DocBookHistory

You can read up on the history behind DocBook in the [Short DocBook History](http://docbook.org/tdg/en/html/ch01.html#d0e2132) section of the first chapter of DocBookTheDefinitiveGuide and in Dale Dougherty's article, [The Making of the DocBook DTD](http://www.xml.com/pub/a/1999/10/docbook/docbook-making.html).

Archived versions of the DocBook SGML DTD, going all the way back to DocBook 1.0 (released on 10 November 1992), are available on the DocBook SGML page at the official DocBook site at OASIS. There's also a XML page that provides archived versions of the DocBook XML DTD, which began life with the 4.0 release of DocBook, as DocBook XML 4.0.

Going all the way back, courtesy of the Erik Naggum's SGML Repository in Oslo (README file, mirror site at SUNET in Sweden), you can find the minutes from 1991 and 1992 meetings of the informal organization that went on to produce the original DocBook DTD, the Davenport Group:

• 28 May 1991
• 21 June 1991
• 16 July 1991
• 24 and 25 September 1991
• 18 and 19 December, 1991
• 12 and 13 May 1992

And, this time courtesy of the Wayback Machine, you can also peruse a snapshot of the Davenport Group website as it existed in June 18, 1997.