History of XAS

1955 Mar: LC is born
1979 Sep: LC starts working in X-ray astronomy
198x xxx: Italian institutes propose the SAX X-ray satellite mission to the 
          National Space Plan (PSN)
1982 Jul: LC works at Exosat Observatory and is dissatisfied with lack 
          of a general-purpose X-ray astronomy analysis system.
1985 Jan: LC becomes involved in SAX
1985 Nov: Draft "notes for building a portable XAS package"

• At the time Italian institutes involved have in house a variety of platforms from IBM mainframes, HP1000 mini and VAXes. Nobody has heard of Unix or C.

  
  1986 Sep: LC and Marco Morini (IFCAI) produce
            "A Study on Fortran compatibility".
  1987 Dec: PSN sets up a Technical Committee to supply VAXes to Italian 
            SAX institutes
  1988 Feb: Technical Committee issues final report
  1988 Mar: LC and Marco Morini produce
            "Elements for a discussion ...for SDC software component" 
            which contains most of the guidelines for XAS.
  1988 Aug: LC and Marco Morini begin working on the design of 
           the software. The name XAS is invented.
  1989 Jun: the VAXes 8250 bought by the Italian Space Agency (ASI, 
            formerly PSN) are delivered to the SAX Institutes.
  1990 Jan:  LC (since Marco Morini left research) issues
            "A proposal for XAS specifications - draft 0.5"
            otherwise known as 'the XAS dream book"

• Around the same time institutes start acquiring their first Sun and HP workstations, while continuing using their previous platforms.

  
  1991 Apr: date of earliest Unix VOS routines (on Sun, 2 during 1991)
  1991 May: date of earliest VMS VOS routines (8 during 1991)
  1991 Jun: one Ultrix DECstation is delivered by ASI to the SAX Institutes.
  1991 Oct: Issue 1.0 of definition of XAS file format
  1991 Dec: date of earliest XAS library routines (2 during 1992)
  1992 Feb: first document defining XAS directory tree
  1992 Apr: first concept of "packetcap" to access SAX telemetry data
            Daniele Dal Fiume (ITESRE) starts collaborating to VOS 
  1992 May: date of earliest XAS program (draft version 0.0, 9 during 1992)
  1992 Aug: Issue 2.0 of definition of XAS file format
  1992 Sep: LC uses extensively XAS libraries in building programs 
            for EPIC simulations
  
  1992 Nov: first release of XAS 1.0 for VMS, Ultrix and SunOS with
            35 library routines, 21 VOS/Unix, 17 VOS/VMS and 7 main programs
  
  1993 Jan: first routines for client-server communication
  1993 Feb: fromfits 1.0 (first program not written by LC)
  1993 May: first implementation of "packetcap" (fotlib library)
  1993 Jul: X11 and PostScript client-server prototype on Ultrix
  1993 Aug: Daniele Dal Fiume releases xasbuild 1.0
  1993 Nov: LC and Daniele Dal Fiume start working at XAS 1.1
  1994 May: working prototype of FOT filing program
            LC and Daniele Dal Fiume resume working at XAS 1.1
  
  1994 Aug: release of XAS 1.1 - this set of WWW pages started
            XAS includes 123 system-independent library routines, 
            62 VOS/Unix, 38 VOS/VMS and 44 main programs excluding demos
  
  1994 Nov: MECS calibrations at Panter. VMS XAS used for quick look.
            Ultrix XAS extensively used for calibration data analysis.
  1994-95 : XAS (Ultrix and HP-UX) used extensively at Italian SAX institutes
            for NFI ground calibration data analysis (with several ad-hoc
            home-grown additions)
  1995 Jul: first sample FOT available, XAS accumulator programs start
            reading flight-format data
  1995 Sep: SAX SDC imports the current XAS distribution
  1996 Jan: one AlphaStation is delivered by ASI to the SAX Institutes.
  1996 Feb: prototype of XAS HTML help files
  1996 Mar: pre-release of XAS to SAX SDC
  
  1996 Apr: SAX is launched
  
  1996 Jun: SAX instrument Commissioning Phase starts
             first real FOT data. XAS used on experimenter's stations in SDC to
             support near real time analysis.
  1996 Jun: full set of AlphaStations delivered by ASI to the SAX Institutes.
  1996 Jul: SAX Science Verification Phase starts
  1996 Aug: XAS ported to Digital Unix (OSF/1)
  
  1996 Oct: these WWW pages updated and moved to new server