Donald E. Knuth decided to create a new typesetting system, which would be called TEX, because there had been a change in the printing system used for the volumes of his book The Art of Computer Programming and Knuth found the result of the new system awful.
The goal of TEX was then to have a system which would always produce the same documents independently of the actual machine they were processed on. Knuth also designed the Computer Modern family of typefaces and the METAFONT language for font description.
The work initiated in 1977 was nished (the languages were frozen ) in 1989. TEX and METAFONT are not evolving any more except for minor bug xes (TEX versions are numbered following the decimals of