20 February 1991 Guido van Rossum posted in the alt group .sources the first release of the Python programming language, over which worked since December 1989 as part of a project to create a scripting language for solving system administration problems in the operating system Amoeba , which would be of a higher level than C, but, unlike the Bourne shell, would provide a more convenient access to OS system calls.
The name for the project was chosen in honor of the comedy group Monty Python. In the first version, support for classes with inheritance, exception handling, a system of modules and the base types list, dict and str was implemented. The implementation of modules and exceptions was borrowed from the Modula-3 language, and the coding style based on indentation from the language ABC , which Guido previously contributed to.