I liked Textile a lot better initially, and it came out first. And interestingly, both launched at the same time on the platform (Movable Type) where Markdown debuted. So it really was sort of a clean A-B test about which one users chose.

This piece was already pretty long, so I cut out most of the sidebar about Dean Allen and Textile, but he was a special guy, and certainly influential on so many parts of this era, not just Markdown.