OpenLaszlo started life as a commercial product called Laszlo Presentation Server, first released in 2002. When development began in 2001, our goals were twofold -- first, to enable the delivery of rich applications that run in any web browser without installation; and, second, to make the development of these applications more web-like -- i.e., to use a markup language and script to describe rich interactive applications, just as HTML describes hypertext documents. Remember that in 2001, the mainstream way to create interactive applications was to use C++ and Windows -- platform-specific tools that result in applications requiring installation.