This year is the 25th Anniversary of the Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (GRASS), the most powerful spatial analytical GIS software available.
GRASS started life as the Ft. Hood Environmental Management System, written in C by the Army's Construction Engineering Research Lab (CERL) at the University of Illinois. Written to run on UNIX, it was in the public domain, but sold by vendors who tuned it to run on various UNIX flavors. About 10 years ago CERL stopped development and support and the copyright was transferred to the GIS Research Lab at Baylor University. Development continued. led by a small group in Europe, and when the new version was released it was under the GPL. Development has been on linux since then, but it also runs on various *BSD and has been ported to winduhs (with cygwin, I believe). A lot of software comes and goes. One of the most powerful DOS applications, TimeLine, never made it to the linux world (a major loss for us to be sure), but GRASS grows in its user base and is here to stay. It now has a working wxPython GUI as well as the original Tcl/Tck GUI, and the command line interface for defining directories is as ugly and inefficient as it was 25 years ago. But, it works very well for a very broad range of applications. I'd love to see the hydrological runoff model of the entire US running on a supercomputer. When it was last done by the fine folks at Baylor (in 2004) on a Sun workstation (I forget the model), it was the only application process running and took a week to complete (GRASS-4.1, interger only). Rich _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
