Subject: Happy Birthday, FITS!

From: dwells at nrao.edu (Don Wells)
Date: Tue, 29 Mar 1994 16:03:33 GMT

My copy of the (handwritten) Basic FITS Agreement is dated 
29 March 1979, so FITS is 15 years old today. Happy Birthday, FITS!

Sometime in the mid-80s NRAO-Greenbank wanted to clean out their stock
of old reprints, and they sent their remaining original reprints for
the Basic-FITS paper to Charlottesville; Eric said I should keep them.

As a birthday present for FITS, I offer these original reprints to the
FITS community. I will mail them to individuals in the order in which
I receive Email requests, until the stock is exhausted.

I have 43 copies of the June 1981 A&A Suppl. Basic-FITS paper.

I also have 52 copies of the 1981 Random-Groups paper, and will
include them with the Basic-FITS reprints.

Finally, the reprint collection includes 42 copies of a little-known
paper "The FITS tape formats: flexible image transport systems", by
Greisen, Wells and Harten, pp.298-300 in SPIE Vol. 264, "Applications
of Digital Image Processing to Astronomy". This volume is the
proceedings of an IP meeting held at JPL/Caltech in August 1980, so
this paper appeared in print before the Basic-FITS and Random-Groups
papers. It is a 3-page overview of the early FITS agreements which is
notable for its Figure 2 "A schematic illustration of the most general
structure used for the binary data". This figure is a wonderful 3-D
illustration of how random-groups data structures cross over logical
record boundaries. The concept of this illustration is also fully
applicable to binary tables data structures, of course, and I wish
that this figure could somehow be recycled and appear in FITS
document(s) in the 90s (perhaps in the binary tables paper?).

At that August 1980 IP meeting at JPL there was a special
birds-of-a-feather session on the problem of coordinating development
of astronomical software. The formation of the AAS Working Group for
Astronomical Software [WGAS] was the primary result of that session.

                -*-

Two years ago, my birthday present for FITS was a long report on the
developments leading up to FITS, and on the early history of FITS.
See ftp://fits.cv.nrao.edu/fits/documents/overviews/history.news.
--
  Donald C. Wells         Associate Scientist         dwells at nrao.edu
                    http://fits.cv.nrao.edu/~dwells
  National Radio Astronomy Observatory                +1-804-296-0277
  520 Edgemont Road,   Charlottesville, Virginia       22903-2475 USA