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GRASS History

Historical Notes

GRASS (Geographic Resources Analysis Support System) GRASS has been under continuous development since 1982 and has involved a large number of federal US agencies, universities, and private companies. The core components of GRASS and the management of the integration efforts into GRASS releases were accomplished by the U.S. Army - Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (USA-CERL) in Champaign, Illinois. USA-CERL completed its last release of GRASS as version 4.1 in 1992, and provided five updates and patches to this release through 1995. USA-CERL also wrote the core components of the GRASS 5.0 floating point version.

GRASS Credits

From "GRASS Mini-HOWTO": In the early 1980s the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers' Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (USA/CERL) in Champaign, Illinois, began to explore the possibilities of using Geographic Information Systems to conduct environmental research, assessments, monitoring and management of lands under the stewardship of the U. S. Department of Defense. Part of the motivation for this action was new responsibility for the environment encoded into the National Environmental Policy Act of the late 1970s.
Bill Goran of USA/CERL conducted a survey of available GISs, assuming that he could find several systems capable of environmental analysis, from which he could select one or more to recommend for use by CERL and perhaps others in the Department of Defense. However, he was surprised to find no GIS that satisfied his needs. What started as a selection process turned into a design exercise for his own GIS development program.
USA/CERL hired several programmers, and began by writing a hybrid raster-vector GIS for the VAX UNIX environment. This made the team one of the first to seriously develop GIS for UNIX. Though they still faced challenges with different versions of UNIX, they developed procedures of coding in ANSI standard UNIX, avoiding "tweaking" the code toward any particular vendor-specific flavor of UNIX.

Lynn Van Warren recalls the design of Fort Hood GIS software design that lead to GRASS development

Detailed GRASS releases page

GRASS releases

 GRASS 4.2.1 development
    • - started 1998 by Markus Neteler in Germany with worldwide contributions
    • - more than 230 improvements and bugfixes
    • - 50 new modules added
    • - graphical user interface "TclTkGRASS" added (Jacques Bouchard)
    • [- code cleanup from leftover files (more than 1000)]
    • 1999 GRASS Development Team is formed - Markus Neteler and Bruce Byars coordinate an effort to bring all GRASS development and research into a single group of international scientists.
GRASS 4.3 development
    • 1999 GRASS 4.3 is released by the GRASS Development Team. The last release of non-floating point GRASS, based on the GRASS 4.2 and 4.2.1 code.
GRASS 5.* development
    • 1995 Unofficial GRASS 5.0 version from USA-CERL
    • 1999 GRASS 5.0 is released under GNU GPL by the GRASS Development Team. The first major change in years, this version incorporates floating point calculations and NULL support into GRASS raster engine.
    • 31.12.1999 GRASS 5.0 CVS server established
    • 1/2001 Request Tracker (RT) established for bug tracking
    • 2001 GRASS Europe pages moved from University of Hannover, Germany to ITC-irst, Italy: http://grass.itc.it/
    • 5. September 2002 GRASS 5.0.0 stable released (GRASS Development team lead by Markus Neteler at ITC-irst, Trento, Italy)
    • 2002 GRASS 5.1 started at ITC-irst, Trento, Italy
    • November 2003 GRASS 5.0.x becomes a "critical bug fix only" version, new development streams started (see Development Roadmap).
    • May 2004 GRASS 5.3.x becomes a "critical bug fix only" version, new development streams started (see Development Roadmap).
    • June 2004 GRASS 5.7.0 release.

 Hosting agencies for the GRASS conferences:

    • 1 (1985) Fort Hood, Texas
    • 2 (1986) Fort Lewis, Washington
    • 3 (1987) National Space Technology Lab, Stennis Space Center,
    • 4 (1988) Champaign. USA CERL
    • 5 (1989) Alexandria, Va.  Soil Conservation Service
    • 6 (1990) UC Berkeley
    • 7 (1992) Denver, National Park Service
    • 8 (1993) Reston, Va.  USGS, SCS, FBI
    • (1994) Paris, France (5TH European GRASS Users Meeting)
    • 9th Annual GRASS GIS User's Conference and Exhibition (Sponsered by the Open GIS Foundation, Hosted by the Soil Conservation Service, March 13-18,'94 Reston Virginia)
    • (2000) 1. Italian GRASS Meeting at Como, Italy
    • (2001) 2. Italian GRASS Meeting at University of Trento, Italy
    • (2001) 1. German GRASS Meeting at University of Mainz
    • (2002) 3. Italian GRASS Meeting at University of Trieste, Italy
    • (2002) Open Source Free Software GIS - GRASS users conference 2002, Trento, Italy, 11-13 September 2002
    • (2004) 4. Italian GRASS Meeting at University of Padova, Italy
© 1999-2004 GRASS Development Team
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