Geopackage: Difference between revisions
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The 300-baud modem experience proved unworkable and we determined that a computer must be placed at the user's site. It is now 1983 and the first small Unix computer was being offered by the just created Sun computer company. Michael O'Shea joined our little group as a programmer and we purchased a Sun-1 computer for our development purposes and one for Fort McClellan.
We delivered a system called IGIS - the Installation GIS. This system moved data from inside the programs (as in FHIS) to data bases, making it possible to use the same software for multiple locations. IGIS sported a Sun color monitor, which was separate from the monochrome monitor used to enter commands. Our Fort McClellan customer, Ray Clark, chief of the environmental office was impressed with the new computer and software for his office. Upon seeing the first map image on the screen, he asked "Can you rotate it?" The Star Trek TV series had really raised expectations within our target user community.
With the success of IGIS we now had interest coming in from several potential customers and we continued adding more capabilities. Another new company offering Unix within a small computer called MASSCOMP provided us with the need to port our software. Also, new color dot-matrix printers allowed us to create our first color hard-copy maps. With a swelling of new customers the need to maintain the software on multiple computers running at multiple sites, we packaged our 20 programs and called the turn-key solution GRASS - the Geographic Resource Analysis Support System. The name continued a series of GIS names based on plants : SAGE (a DOS-based GIS) and MOSS (Mapping Overlay Statistical System) developed by the Bureau of Land Management.
Our suite of GIS demonstration programs, intended to attract enough interest from our user community to allow us to become one of the first ESRI customers, was now packaged and named as a real GIS system. This baby grew rapidly and we abandoned our hope (and need) to purchase ESRI software.
|||James Westervelt (2004) "[https://grass.osgeo.org/files/westervelt2004_GRASS_roots.pdf GRASS Roots]" Proceedings of the FOSS/GRASS Users Conference Bangkok}}
=== GRASS ===
{{Cquote|GRASS GIS has been under continuous development since 1982, when the US Army Corps of Engineer's Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (USA/CERL) started exploring the use of GIS for environmental research, monitoring and management of military lands. Since no other software package available back then met all their requirements, they designed and developed their own. GRASS GIS was born under the name of Fort Hood Information System (FHIS).
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