O'Reilly Media (O'Reilly Media)

O'Reilly Media (formerly O'Reilly & Associates) is an American media company established by Tim O'Reilly that publishes books and web sites and produces conferences on computer technology topics. Their distinctive brand features a woodcut of an animal on many of their book covers.



Company



The company began in 1978 as a private consulting firm doing technical writing, based in the Cambridge, Massachusetts area. In 1984, it began to retain publishing rights on manuals created for Unix vendors. A few 70-page "Nutshell Handbooks" were well-received, but the focus remained on the consulting business until in 1988, the public showed great interest at a conference for its preliminary Xlib manuals, which alerted the company that there was an under-served audience for their kind of books[citation needed].



In 1992, when there were only 200 web sites, O'Reilly Media published the first book about the web[citation needed], devoting a whole chapter to it, in Ed Krol's groundbreaking Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog (1992). O'Reilly Media also created the first web portal (and the first Internet site to do advertising), the Global Network Navigator, or GNN, in 1993. GNN was sold to AOL in 1995 in one of the first big transactions of the dot com boom.



In 1997, Programming Perl was one of the top 100 books in any category[citation needed] at Borders during all of 1996 despite a lack of mainstream computer industry recognition. O'Reilly launched a Perl Conference to raise the profile of Perl. Many of the company's other software bestsellers were also on topics that were off the radar of the commercial software industry. So in 1998, O'Reilly invited many of the leaders of these software projects to a meeting. Originally called the freeware summit, the meeting became known as the Open Source Summit because it was at this ga