Relative to widespread brand recognition, I guess, and relative to similar initiatives. But indeed, Markdown — as in, the concept of _lightweight markup_ — predates the Web and is at least as old as Usenet. I footnote 9, I linked to my Github repo with Markdown resources; there you’ll find the following chronology:<p>- Setext (Ian Feldman, 1992)
- AFT (Todd Coram, 1999)
- Grutatxt (Ángel Ortega, 2000)
- atx (Aaron Swartz, 2002)
- AsciiDoc (Stuart Rackham, 2002)
- MediaWiki (Magnus Manske &amp; Lee Daniel Crocker, 2002)
- reStructuredText (David Goodger, 2002)
- Org-mode (Carsten Dominik, 2003)
- Textile (Dean Allen, 2004)
- Markdown (John Gruber &amp; Aaron Swartz, 2004)