1973
Professor Michael Ralph Stonebraker and his colleague Professor Eugene Wong started a research project on the “Relational Database Systems” at the University of California, Berkeley.
1976
Stonebraker and Wong published their project and named it INGRES (Interactive Graphics and Retrieval System).
1980
Stonebraker, Wong, and another Berkeley professor, Lawrence A. Rowe founded Relational Technology, Incorporated (RTI) to commercialize INGRES.
1985
Stonebraker and Rowe started another project, named POSTGRES (POST INGRES) to resolve the limitations of existing database management by implementing a relational model.
1986
POSTGRES implementation began by using many of the concepts of INGRES, but not its code. It was sponsored by DARPA, ARO, NSF, ESL Inc.
1987
The first “demoware” system, a prototype version of POSTGRES was released and was presented at the 1988 ACM-SIGMOD Conference.
1989
POSTGRES Version 1 was released and it was made available to a few external users. But the first rule system was criticized.
1990
POSTGRES Version 2 was released. The rule system that was criticized in the previous version was redesigned.
1991
POSTGRES Version 3 was released by adding multiple storage managers, an improved query executor, and a rewritten rule system.
1992
POSTGRES gained popularity and was being used in many research & commercial applications and as an educational tool at several universities.
1993
POSTGRES external user community nearly doubled. It was not possible to maintain the source code and provide support to the large user community by the research team alone.
1994
POSTGRES project officially ended with Version 4.2. In the same year, POSTQUEL was replaced with SQL to widen its user community, creating Postgres95.
1996
“Postgres95” name was replaced by a more sophisticated name, PostgreSQL to reflect its SQL compatibility. In the same year, the PostgreSQL website was launched.
1997
PostgreSQL version 6.0 was released. Since then it is developed and maintained by PostgreSQL Global Development Group (PGDG) and releases under free and open-source, PostgreSQL License.
1998
PGDG started releasing new versions regularly. New features are being added in each new version and which features were added in which version can be seen here.
