Vend was written by Andrew Wilcox in the early part of 1995, and the first released (beta) version was 0.2. Vend 0.2 is the parent of MiniVend, and the first version of MiniVend (called Vend 0.2m7) was totally based on that. It added searching and DBM catalog storage. Subsequent versions took parts from Vend 0.3, especially the VLINK and Server.pm modules, which were adapted to run with MiniVend.
The first release of MiniVend (1.0) was on February 23, 1996, making it nearly three years old. A veritable eon in web time!
Other portions of Vend, notably the database interface from 0.3, were adopted, but there are distinct differences between MiniVend and Vend.
Andrew is no longer working on Vend, and all questions and comments regarding both Vend and MiniVend should be directed to Mike Heins, <mikeh@minivend.com>