Friday 28 June 2013

History

Lead developer Mike Muuss works on the XM-1 tank in BRL‑CAD at a PDP‑11/70 terminal, circa 1980.

In 1979, the U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL) (now the United States Army Research Laboratory) expressed a need for tools that could assist with the computer simulation and engineering analysis of combat vehicle systems and environments. When no existing computer-aided design (CAD) package was found to be adequate for this purpose, BRL software developers—led by Mike Muuss—began assembling a suite of utilities capable of interactively displaying, editing, and interrogating geometric models. This suite became known as BRL-CAD. Development on BRL-CAD as a package subsequently began in 1983; the first public release was made in 1984. BRL-CAD became an open source project on December, 2004.

The BRL-CAD source code repository is believed to be the oldest public version-controlled codebase in the world that's still under active development, dating back to 1983-12-16 00:10:31 UTC.

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