Keychain's 25th Anniversary!

[danielrobbins]

When I started writing Keychain in June 2001, I was 27 years old, living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and writing articles for IBM developerWorks to support my young family. Gentoo Linux was a thriving new Linux distribution, still working its way toward 1.0. Portage was a young package manager, and I was in the middle of writing emerge while redesigning the Gentoo website.

I connected to the Internet through a 256K DSL modem. Wi-Fi existed, but it was still a new and optional technology. The fastest Power Macs used PowerPC G4 processors running below 1GHz and supported less than 2GB of RAM. Apple laptops were PowerBooks; the MacBook name did not yet exist. The iPhone was still six years away, and the original 5GB iPod was still several months away from being announced. September 11 had not yet happened.

It was in that world, while writing my OpenSSH Key Management series for IBM developerWorks, that I created a small shell script to make encrypted SSH keys and ssh-agent practical for everyday use. That script became Keychain. Keychain 1.0 was released in August 2001, and I formally introduced it to developerWorks readers in Part 2 of the series the following month.

On July 23, 2026, I released Keychain 3.0.0, marking 25 years of Keychain development. This was not a minor update, but a ground-up rewrite and rethinking of how Keychain should work in modern environments. Twenty-five years later, its central purpose remains the same: keep one long-running agent available across your terminals and sessions, so encrypted keys can remain secure without requiring you to enter the same passphrase over and over again.

The fun 25th anniverary note is an excerpt from my full Keychain 3.0.0 release/25th Anniversary announcement on kernel-seeds.org. And as a special bonus, here's a screenshot of what my graphical terminal looked like in 2001, running Keychain 1.0:

[infowolfe]

Congrats on your 25th birthday, keychain!