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.
GRASS releases
-
1982 Fort Hood Information
System (FHIS) (Vax 11/780)
-
1983 Installation Geographic
Information System (IGIS) (SUN-1 Microcomputer)
-
1984 GRASS (SUN-1 and
Masscomp)
-
1985 GRASS 1.0, GRASSnet
established [GRASShopper archive 1991-95,
GRASSList archive 1996-today]
-
1986 GRASS 1.1;
receives "Exemplary Systems in Government Award" from URISA
-
1987 GRASS 2.0; first
issue of GRASSClippings, GRASS video narrated by William Shatner (Captain
Kirk of Star Trek)
-
1988 GRASS 3.0; Army
R&D Achievement Award (Webster, Goran, Shapiro, Westervelt)
-
1991 GRASS 4.0; released
through Internet - popularity grows with universities, business and government
agencies.
-
1993 GRASS 4.1; Federal
Lab Consortium - Award for Excellence in Technology Transfer
-
1995 GRASS 4.1.5 port
to Linux: Yung-Tsung Kang, Michigan State University
-
2/1996 USA-CERL
no longer support GRASS announcement
-
1997 GRASS 4.2 Baylor
University - The first "GRASS Research Group" takes control of GRASS Development
from USACERL.
This first new release
in 4 years adds numerous programs. Popularity increases with academic community.
-
1998 GRASS4.2.1 Markus
Neteler, Germany
- Detailed GRASS releases page
-
26. October 1999 GRASS 5.0
released under GNU GPL (Baylor University and Markus Neteler)
-
5. September 2002 GRASS 5.0.0
stable released (GRASS Development team lead by Markus Neteler at ITC-irst, Trento, Italy)
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 Inofficial 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
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
© 1999-2002 GRASS Development Team
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