Relative to widespread brand recognition, I guess, and relative to similar initiatives. But indeed, Markdown — as in, the concept of _lightweight markup_ — predates the Web and is at least as old as Usenet. I footnote 9, I linked to my Github repo with Markdown resources; there you’ll find the following chronology:

- Setext (Ian Feldman, 1992) - AFT (Todd Coram, 1999) - Grutatxt (Ángel Ortega, 2000) - atx (Aaron Swartz, 2002) - AsciiDoc (Stuart Rackham, 2002) - MediaWiki (Magnus Manske & Lee Daniel Crocker, 2002) - reStructuredText (David Goodger, 2002) - Org-mode (Carsten Dominik, 2003) - Textile (Dean Allen, 2004) - Markdown (John Gruber & Aaron Swartz, 2004)