SharePoint History

SharePoint evolved from projects codenamed "Office Server” and “Tahoe” during the Office XP development cycle.

“Office Server” evolved out of the FrontPage and Office Server Extensions and “Team Pages”. It targeted simple, bottom-up collaboration.

“Tahoe”, built on shared technology with Exchange and the “Digital Dashboard”, targeted top-down portals, search and document management.

The versions are (in chronological order):

Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2001
Microsoft SharePoint Team Services (2002)
Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 (free license) - Microsoft SharePoint 2003 (commercial release)
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (free license) - plus Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (commercial extension)
Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 (free) - plus Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 (commercial extension for Foundation), and SharePoint Enterprise 2010 (commercial extension for Server)

System requirements

Processor	64-bit, four cores
RAM	4 GB for developer or evaluation use At least 8 GB for production use in one server or multiple server farm
Hard disk	80 GB for system drive, varies for production environment depending on application size

Operating system	Windows Server 2008 SP2 (64-bit) Standard, Enterprise, Data Center, or Web Server Windows Server 2008 R2 (64-bit) Standard, Enterprise, Data Center, or Web Server Windows 7 (64-bit) or Windows Vista (64-bit) (for test and development purposes only, requires package modification)
Database server	Microsoft SQL Server 2008 (64-bit) R2 Microsoft SQL Server 2008 (64-bit) with Service Pack 1 and Cumulative Update 2 (Reporting Services Integration requires Cumulative Update 8) Microsoft SQL Server 2005 (64-bit) SP3

Supported web browsers include

Internet Explorer 7 or later: 32-bit version of this browser are fully supported; 64-bit versions have limited support
Firefox 3.6: Limited support
Safari 4.04: Limited support
Google Chrome 12: Limited support with Service Pack 1

References: wikipedia