Those of you who have been in the jailbreaking scene should be familiar with the name BigBoss. He is the hoster of countless apps in Cydia, and previously Installer. He has generously created a timeline of milestones he has achieved, which I found interesting. I actually remember these occurring, back in the day.

September 2007: BigBoss repository was born and run on my home computer at a markmon.mine.nu address that is now a dead link. The repository was for installer (1.7 at the time) and hosted a few small packages and fixes. The repository was started purely for fun as a side project. The repository was named “BigBoss repository” at that time (named after its owner, BigBoss), a name that carried through for months.

December 2007: BigBoss was looking for a host because it was too much traffic for his little home network connection. Sleepers stepped up to offer hosting. The repostory, still “BigBoss repository” moved to sleepers.net for hosting.

Feb 2008: BigBoss enters community sources in installer 3 thanks to Nullriver and Drudge.  BigBoss only has 25 packages at this time.

March 2008: BigBoss registers “thebigboss.org” domain name and moves the repository to that domain, its permanent home through today. Hosting at that time was still hosted by sleepers.net

May 2008: Drudge gives Conceited Software to Bigboss. BigBoss merges this well-known community source into his own. This provided enough packages to surpass STE packaging and BigBoss become the largest community source. Repository kept its name, “BigBoss Repository”.

May 2008: Cydia side of the repository is born on 1.1.x platforms.

June 2008: Skylar gives his community source to BigBoss. Repository is still known as “BigBoss Repository”.

June 2008: BigBoss partners up wtih planet-iphones and repository is known as “BigBoss and Planet-iPhones”. Themes are done by planet-iphones and other done by BigBoss. This is actually very helpful because up to this point, BigBoss did all his own packaging. Now the work is divided. Partnership still exists today.

May-July 2008: BigBoss gets 6 more servers to host the high traffic generated by becoming a community source.

July 2008: The 2.0 iPhone software is released. The 1.1.x installer repository is abandoned with over 275 packages – the largest repostiory on 1.1.x. At this time, a new repository is born for 2.0 from scratch. Cydia is all that’s supported since no installer exists at this time for 2.0.

August 2008: Installer 4 beta comes out. BigBoss repository moves to installer4. But due to bugs with the beta and unmet dependencies only found in Cydia only a small amount of packages are migrated to installer 4.

July – Sept 2008: BigBoss gets another 10 servers to handle the bandwidth.

October 2008: BigBoss moves hosting of the packages file away from sleepers.net hosting the repostiory on his own servers only. (The 16 some file servers did not change). Since the domain was always thebigboss.org or bigboss.us.com (same domain) there was no change noticed or required for users.

November 2008: BigBoss gets a 2nd dedicated server to handle cpu and connection count issues.

December 2008: BigBoss repository has grown to 850 packages across 18 servers!

Wow. I know. A lot of stuff. Personally, I would like to thank BigBoss for all of the hard work he has put into the jailbreaking community. Good job, and keep up the excellent work. For more information, go to http://thebigboss.org/.

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