July 1999. Jetty 2.2.0 improved configuration and dynamic servlets. Many improvements and bug fixes contributed from the Open Source community. January 1999. Jetty 2.1.0 upgraded to JSDK 2.1 API.
October 1998. Jetty 2.0.1 released as Open Source
October 1998. Jetty 2.0 released with HTTP/1.1 support.
December 1997. Jetty development finally progressed to a Release 1.0 stage. The package hierarchy was moved to a com.mortbay structure and merged with the other software packages of Mort Bay Consulting. The JSDK versions of the javax.servlets were included in the release in accordance with JavaSoft licensing requirements.
February 1997. All involved agreed that MBServler was a terrible name, so many weeks of effort were put in to remove all references to that name. In the process the HttpHandler architecture was developed and support for the beta1.0 javax.servlet API added. Jetty was picked as the new name, as it started with a J and there is a little jetty in the Mort Bay Logo. You can supply your own subtitles along the lines of "Jetty - dock your applications to the Web".
December 1996. The HTML generation package was used re-implemented and documented. Release V4.5B of MBServler and IssueTracker were made available.
May 1996. Mort Bay entered a partnership with Intelligent Switched Systems to develop telephony and WWW based authenticated service platforms. MBServler is used extensively in those platforms and was incrementally improved by the process.
March 1996. Mort Bay Consulting Pty. Ltd. took over the server and tracking application. The server was renamed MBServler (a Servlet Serving Server) and ported to the then release alpha javax.servlet API.
December 1995. Greg Wilkins wrote a HTTP Server and WWW defect tracking application as an entry to the Sun Microsystems Australia Java programming contest. Greg's entry won the contest. This pre-dated Javasoft's announcement of Jeeves and the javax.servlet API, so the server defined its own API.