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The Worldwide Developers Conference is an annual trade show for Apple developers. Commonly abbreviated to WWDC.
The conference is held once a year in California. The attendee numbers have varied between roughly 2000 - 3500 developers in recent years. It is Apple's chance to introduce new technologies to its developers, and has been used in recent years to demonstrate and distribute preview versions of upcoming Mac OS X versions.
The conference starts off with a keynote. Since 1998, it has always been held by CEO Steve Jobs.
The first WWDC was held in Monterey, CA in 1983.
Locations and dates of recent WWDCs:
- 1998, San Jose, May 11 - May 15
- 1999, San Jose, May 10 - May 14
- 2000, San Jose, May 15 - May 19
- 2001, San Jose, May 21 - May 25
- 2002, San Jose, May 6 - May 10
- 2003, San Francisco, June 23 - June 27
- 2004, San Francisco, June 28 - July 2
Broadened Scope
In 2003, WWDC was merged with another Apple trade show called QuickTime Expo. The number of QuickTime sessions was increased, and the Apple Design Awards were joined by Apple Design Awards for QuickTime Content. At the same time, more enterprise oriented content was added, focusing a lot on the Xserve and Mac OS X Server operating system.
All attendees have to sign a non-disclosure agreement covering the sessions and other material handed out at WWDC. In the past, the keynote was also covered by the NDA, but Apple is now webcasting the keynote address to an audience much wider than just developers. It used to be that WWDC was not a place for hardware announcements, but Apple deviated from that principle in 2002 when it announcing the rack mounted server Xserve, and in 2003, introducing the consumer-oriented iSight.
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