From: Helena Mitasova - staff <helena@gis.uiuc.edu>
Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2001 11:00:04 -0600
To: neteler@geog.uni-hannover.de
Subject: g3dhistory

> I thought Roman has
>been developing *grid3d* and not g3d. However, these mails talk
>about g3d (I thought this was done my Mark Astley).

It was Roman who has
written the entire g3d library with some input from Mike Shapiro - Mike has been 
always very careful about keeping things consistent in GRASS, that is
why I believed that g3d is as consistent with old GRASS as possible.
 Mark Astley did mostly NVIZ tcltk work
and when Roman had the first version of g3d running I asked
him to port s.vol.rst and write some basic programs to test it.

grid3 goes well back into 1991-1993 and it was written by Dave Gerdes -
he was the real leader of the visualization effort at CERL
- he actually designed a lot of sg3d and nviz, and he designed
and written makedspf and showdspf programs too (along with Jane whos
last name I don't know because when I came she was already gone.
Dave has hired Bill, Terry, me and other people to CERL to work 
on visualization and other related tools (interpolation, etc.)
There is no documentation for grid3 - it is a stand alone format
and has very little supporting programs. It is not worth
going back to it. Romans library should be much better, it just
needs testing and clean-up as it was never really used and tested,
as there wasn't really any data or applications to use it for
at CERL.

We had also considered using HDF, but there were too many concerns 
about where it would go and that we would be too much dependent
upon their fate - we knew the HDF group very well as they are
at NCSA and I think that Mike actually now works with them.

thats just a little bit of history, but it may clarify why things
are as they are,

Helena

p.s. I have finally a new, normal email now - I will soon
re-susbscribe through that email to the grass5 list,
you may email me there : hmitaso@unity.ncsu.edu

