[ScottBurson]

Gruber invented Markdown, full stop.

He may have selected the particular syntactic conventions it uses, but the idea of parsing ASCII markup and converting it to a formatter's input syntax is much older. I'm aware of prior art dating back to 1986 or so -- and wouldn't be surprised if that wasn't the first either.

[jspthrowaway]

Markdown is a specific implementation, a concept lost on the majority of the people in this thread.