The Director project has got a long history. The first version of the Director was developed in Switzerland by Peter Stevens in the early nineteennineties as a set of shell scripts automating routine system management tasks.

Until Director 3.00 was released under the GPL at the beginning of 1999 the SFI Director had been deployed as a commercial system management software product at various sites. Development took place at SFI Technology Services (name change during history ...) - Peter Steven's company.

In 2000 the latest and last version of the shell-script approach was released. After a long discussion the developers agreed that it was time to get a complete rewrite done. This was the birth of the Director 4.

Due to resource problems development of Director 4 did not quite advance quickly - most of the development was finally done by Thomas Aeby in his spare time. Nevertheless some parts of Director 4 were successfully deployed in mid 2000 in a mixed Director3 / Director4 environment.

During 2002 and 2003 SFI got the first web based frontend - Tamias - ready as a part of a larger project aiming at developing a Linux based appliance product line. Tamias and Director got integrated and deployed in a prototype production environment in 2002.

All the time from 2001-2003 the 2nd web based frontend - BigClerk - was developed by Thomas Aeby with very low priority.

Though the SFI team fought a hard fight SFI Technology Services had to be shut down in mid 2003. Ongoing projects were continued by OmnesPRO GmbH. The Director project was taken over by Thomas Aeby and Phinex.

Thomas Aeby, December 2003