Re: [Plplot-devel] ABOUT file

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

On 2011-07-29 12:49-0600 Maurice LeBrun wrote:

> 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 Some of the early history is in the (hopelessly out of date) intro in the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.

Hi Maurice:

That extra information you supplied that is not already in our manual
makes fascinating reading so I hope Hazen includes all of it along
with what is in our manual.

To answer one of your implicit questions I did the following svn
query:

svn log --revision 1:'{2001-01-01}' --verbose . \
| grep '^r[0-9].*' |grep -v furnish |grep -v lebrun \
|grep -v mjl |less

which revealed the following information about first commits by various PLplot
developers who were not Geoffrey or Maurice up to 2001:

r1 | (no author) | 1992-05-20 14:36:02 -0700 (Wed, 20 May 1992) | 1 line
r6 | wdn | 1992-05-26 00:45:24 -0700 (Tue, 26 May 1992) | 3 lines
r34 | gray | 1992-10-22 09:07:10 -0700 (Thu, 22 Oct 1992) | 3 lines
r1566 | shouman | 1995-05-05 12:34:30 -0700 (Fri, 05 May 1995) | 4 lines
r2098 | airwin | 2000-05-10 14:24:06 -0700 (Wed, 10 May 2000) | 3 lines
r2138 | vincentdarley | 2000-08-03 21:12:08 -0700 (Thu, 03 Aug 2000) | 2 lines
r2149 | rlaboiss | 2000-10-30 05:11:39 -0800 (Mon, 30 Oct 2000) | 2 lines

Since r2 was by furnish, I suspect r1 ("no author") was by him as
well.  I have no idea who "wdn", "gray", and "shouman" were. Rafael
(rlaboiss), Vince (vincentdarley), and I (airwin) were the first
additional developers attracted to PLplot after its move to
Sourceforge in early 2000, and of course many more joined PLplot (or
retired from it) after that.

1986 to the present is a long history we can all be proud of.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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