30 years of ReactOS
home / blogs / 30yrs-of-ros 30 years of ReactOS by Carl Bialorucki | January 22, 2026 Happy Birthday ReactOS! Today marks 30 years since the first commit to the ReactOS source tree. It’s been such a long journey that many of our contributors today, including myself, were not alive during this event. Yet our mission to deliver “your favorite Windows apps and drivers in an open-source environment you can trust” continues to bring people together. Let’s take a brief look at some of the high and low points throughout our history. 1996-2003: The Painful Road to ReactOS 0.1.0 ReactOS started from the ashes of the FreeWin95 project, which aimed to provide a free and open-source clone of Windows 95. FreeWin95 suffered from analysis…
