I have nothing to back this up other than my increasingly unreliable memory, but the semantics of SemVer goes back further than 2009. Maybe it wasn&#x27;t formally written out, but as far back as the 90s that XX.YY.zz could be translated as XX == major changes, breaking changes for APIs, reworked UI for end-user apps. YY == some new functionality, no breaking&#x2F;major changes. zz == bug fixes.<p>It probably goes back further than that, and it was probably one of those &quot;everybody knows...&quot; kind of things, but it definitely didn&#x27;t start to be a widely-known definition a measly seven years ago.