LaTeX was created in 1983 by Leslie Lamport; at the time he was working at SRI. He needed to write TeX macros for his own use. Peter Gordon, an editor at Addison-Wesley, convinced him to write a LaTeX user’s manual for publication. Lamport was initially skeptical that anyone would pay money for it. It came out in 1986 and sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Lamport released versions of his LaTeX macros in 1984 and 1985.

On 21 August 1989, at a TeX User Group meeting at Stanford, Lamport agreed to turn over maintenance and development of LaTeX to Frank Mittelbach. Mittelbach along with Chris Rowley and Rainer Schöpf formed the LaTeX3 team. In 1994 they released LaTeX2e, the current standard version, and continue working on LaTeX3.