I'm working on a web site (http://www.webdocs.org) that hosts the current and older releases of the official Python documentation, along with some other Python-related docs.
Why bother? Python.org has all previous doc releases back to 1.4: http://www.python.org/doc/versions.html
I currently have Python documentation from as far back as version 1.4 on the site, but nothing older. If possible, I'd like to include as many releases of the Python documentation as I can find (if not all of them). However, I can't seem to find anything prior to Python 1.4. (I did happen to find some tex files for a couple older versions, but no html files.)
Older releases didn't publish the HTML (you'd have to run latex2html yourself). Note that the most complete collection of Python downloadables is at http://www.python.org/ftp/python/src/ -- the 1.2 and 1.3 source releases are there and they contain the .tex files.
Also, I'm relatively new to Python (less than a year), so I don't even know which older versions were officially released. For instance, I know that there was a version 1.3 and a 1.2 released, but was there ever a version 1.2.1 or 1.3.1?
If it's not at the URL I mentioned, it wasn't released. (Except for releases up to 1.0, which were lost.
My guess is that no one today would even care about documentation from that far back. But personally I think it's cool to be able to see how Python has evolved over the years.
Me too. :-) You can see the history at the website here (there's a link to it from the python.org home page): http://web.archive.org/web/*sa_/http://www.python.org --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)