Atom vs RSS

Just out of curiosity, I wanted to poke around the history behind these two technologies. It seems that though RSS is widely deployed, Atom is more mature and feature rich.

Here is a link of good comparison between the two:

http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared

This wikipedia article is also very informative:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syndication_format_family_tree