In 2010 Asus announced a new high-end router to replace the RT-N16. I believe that new model was called the RT-N76U at the time. It was finally launched in Canada in early 2012 (a few months after the US launch), under the RT-N66U model name. I spent close to $200 CAD on that router to replace an old, modded Linksys router that was running either DD-WRT or Tomato (can't remember which I ran last on it).
On April 5th 2012 I released a modified firmware on the Asus VIP forums. The RM1 release included patches that I had applied on top of 3.0.0.3.108 GPL code. The project didn't have a formal name yet, "Tomato Regrowth" was the name I was considering, as these first few months were often spent re-enabling Tomato features that Asus had disabled when they forked it to create Asuswrt, such as SSH and HTTPS support. These archives also contain changelogs. Here's the very first one:
For the nostalgic, I have uploaded these first releases to Onedrive (which included the patch code within the archive), in the Museum folder:
https://1drv.ms/f/s!AuCcWdNeYuXMixKSyygGPvuBAag6 Do not try to flash them however, they were for the RT-N66U original CFE which only supported 32KB of nvram.
Something old... and now something new. For those who are more interested in what's coming next, an early preview can be seen in the
https://www.asuswrt-merlin.net/test-builds folder of what has kept me (very) busy these past two weeks.
10 years of doing this is pretty incredible, I never expected this project to ever turn into what it has become today.
Happy birthday!