ksbooth@watcgl.waterloo.edu (04/11/89)
[This is posted for Marceli Wein, wein@nrcdee.ncr.ca, who does not have access to this news group for posting, but does receive e-mail.] Most of the observations in the posting on PHIGS are incorrect. When ANSI X3H3 was formed in about 1979, it took a while to come up with a solid baseline document based on Core. By the time much happened, the German committee DIN submitted to ISO (International Standards Organization) a draft of GKS as a baseline document and it became the only baseline. Much work on GKS was done within ANSI to make it acceptable. There was a tacit understanding that if ANSI supported GKS, the Europeans would suport a later, high-end 3d proposal from US, which would include some structuring. The ANSI Task Group that was developing the high-end proposal was chaired by Dave Shuey from McDonnel Douglas. Much of the work on the 3D models and structuring came from that group. A large contribution came from Eileen McGinnis then with HP, now with Sun. That proposal is PHIGS. At the time there was concern that one lacked test implementations to back up the document. It was the delegate from RPI who offered an RPI thesis project to implement PHIGS. My understanding is that RPI got IBM support as a worthwhile project and I believe it led to a job at IBM for the implementor. The project at RPI was an open, academic project, quite distinct from IBM product development of a PHIGS offering. Incidentally, the IBM delegate was Barry Shephard, whose primary responsibility was to guide the effort in language bindings for all the graphics standards. At that time there was also a proposal, spearheaded by Tom Wright, then with ISSCO, to have a timely small standard - PMIG, Programmer's Minimal Interface to Graphics, characterized by having 20 functions and 20 pages of documentation. That group was folded into the GKS group, so that PMIG would be a true subset of GKS. As a consquence, the ANSI version of GKS includes as its lowest level, the level M (inimal). The ISO version does not. The Europeans came forward in 1983 with a proposed extension to 3D for GKS. An understanding was reached that GKS-3D would have only those extensions that are needed to support 3D, so that the GKS community would have a 3D standard. There would not be any other extensions that would encroach on PHIGS and would not block processing of PHIGS in ISO. All of the above is based on recollections. I have no access to documents to give precise dates. The Canadian delegates to ANSI, including myself, worked on the Computer Graphics Metafile.