This is a good introduction to Markdown for those people who aren't familiar with it, which was me a couple of years ago. You first told me about something called Markdown, and I'm like, "What's that?" LOL.

I was curious about how old it was, and I was surprised. It's been around for 22 years. Here's what GPT said about it:

Markdown was created in 2004 by John Gruber, with significant help from Aaron Swartz on the original parser.

The goal was simple: create a plain text format that's easy for people to read and write, but that can also be converted into clean HTML.

It didn't become ubiquitous overnight. Here's roughly how it spread:

- 2004: Markdown is introduced, mainly among bloggers and technical writers.
- 2008: GitHub launches and eventually adopts Markdown for READMEs, issues, and documentation. This is probably the biggest factor in its widespread adoption.
- 2010s: Stack Overflow, Reddit (partially), Jupyter Notebooks, static site generators, and countless documentation tools embrace it.
- Mid-to-late 2010s: It becomes the de facto standard for developer documentation.
- 2020s: AI assistants like ChatGPT, along with note-taking apps such as Obsidian and Logseq, help bring Markdown into the mainstream beyond programmers.

Today, Markdown is over 20 years old. While it has been widely used by developers for many years, its popularity has grown dramatically thanks to AI tools, which often generate Markdown by default because it is both human-readable and easy for software to convert into rich text.

That's why it suddenly feels like it's everywhere, even though it's been around since the Bush administration.