A Deep-Dive into Qt History with Troll #4 Paul Olav Tvete
At this year’s Qt World Summit, Qt celebrated its 30th birthday. A lot has happened over those 30 years — including plenty you’ve probably never heard of... Like the time Trolltech (the original Qt company) used up a large portion of Norway’s internet, the reasoning behind Trolltech needing an office in Australia so early on, and much, much more.
In this episode, Jesper talks with Troll #4 (now the most senior Troll — by far) for a walk down memory lane.
You won’t learn about new graphics APIs or how to use coroutines with Qt, but hopefully, it will give you a good laugh. So grab a cup of your favorite beverage and enjoy.
Link to 'API Design Principles' from Qt documentation: https://wiki.qt.io/API_Design_Principles
All 'Qt World Summit 2025' videos : https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6CJYn40gN6idH--H9GD_oZIlO2UinYTX
00:00 Intro & Motivation
00:41 When did you start working for the Qt Company?
01:05 Did you know Qt turned 30 this year on the 20th May 2025?
02:19 Can you tell me the story of tmake and qmake?
03:30 When was Qt first official version released?
04:10 Are you Qt’s longest-serving employee?
04:49 What was the first key milestone in Qt's birth?
07:38 Did KDE adopt Qt early on?
10:30 Why was Qt licensed the way it was early on?
13:48 How did Nokia end up buying Trolltech?
16:00 Why did Qt move to mobile phones?
21:00 Where did Qtopia come from?
25:04 What was the QtScape hack?
28:07 Do you recall the transition from Qt3 to Qt4?
31:38 How was the KDE migration journey to Qt4?
Paul Olav Tvete started working in Trolltech in 1996, and has been working as a Qt developer since then, currently in the Oslo graphics team of the Qt Company. He has recently worked on Qt Quick 3D, Qt Quick Shapes, Qt Wayland, in addition to being the maintainer of Qt VNC Server.
The video is presented by Jesper Pedersen, who started with Qt back when Qt was widgets only and the version was 1.44, which gives him 21 years of experience with Qt. Since 2000 he has taught almost 100 Qt classes, ranging from Qt Widgets to QML. Heck, Jesper even taught a few classes on QTopia Core — Trolltech's initial attempt at creating a phone stack. Today Jesper holds a fancy business title, but that doesn't prevent him from coding both in his job and in his spare time.
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