On Friday, July 29, 2011 at 13:57:36 (-0400) Hazen Babcock writes: > > We are only missing the answer to this question: > Why and when did PLplot come to be? > > Which I think that Geoff or Maurice could perhaps answer (a link to a > old e-mail would be fine)? Has anyone else been with the project from > the beginning? > > -Hazen
Ugh.. yeah those emails have been begging for me to comment. Some of the early history is in the (hopelessly out of date) intro in the docbook manual, i.e. http://plplot.sourceforge.net/docbook-manual/plplot-html-5.9.7/intro.html >From this, the project apparently germinated in 1986. Quoting from the manual: PLplot was originally developed by Sze Tan of the University of Auckland in Fortran-77. Many of the underlying concepts used in the PLplot package are based on ideas used in Tim Pearson's PGPLOT package. Sze Tan writes: I'm rather amazed how far PLPLOT has traveled given its origins etc. I first used PGPLOT on the Starlink VAX computers while I was a graduate student at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory in Cambridge from 1983-1987. At the beginning of 1986, I was to give a seminar within the department at which I wanted to have a computer graphics demonstration on an IBM PC which was connected to a completely non-standard graphics card. Having about a week to do this and not having any drivers for the card, I started from the back end and designed PLPLOT to be such that one only needed to be able to draw a line or a dot on the screen in order to do arbitrary graphics. The application programmer's interface was made as similar as possible to PGPLOT so that I could easily port my programs from the VAX to the PC. The kernel of PLPLOT was modeled on PGPLOT but the code is not derived from it. Then Tony Richardson ported it to the Commodore Amiga, rewriting in C with additional improvements. While doing a post-doc fellowship in Japan I needed a free scientific graphics library for my plasma simulation code and came across PLplot on a series of free software for the Amiga ("Fish disks"). I ported it back to several varieties of Unix and took over maintenance from Tony. After returning to the Institute of Fusion Studies at University of TX I continued to develop the package, with Geoff Furnish joining me as co-developer. In the early 90s's the new contributions were released under the LGPL. When I left UT in '95 Geoff became sole maintainer for some years, and was responsible for getting it up at Sourceforge in the earliest days of that site's existence. That made it easier to add collaborators & such, and starting with Alan & Rafael (IIRC) the core team gradually came to be. Feel free to adopt / condense / add-to any of the above. -- Maurice LeBrun ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Got Input? Slashdot Needs You. Take our quick survey online. Come on, we don't ask for help often. Plus, you'll get a chance to win $100 to spend on ThinkGeek. http://p.sf.net/sfu/slashdot-survey _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
