ianr@stardent.com ("Ian Reid @stardent") (07/10/90)
I would like to respond to a number of the comments you made in your email of June 13th to Jeff Hanson. 'AVS was built at Stellar (now Stardent) by Craig Upson and his crew..' Easy-to-use Visualization Toolkits or Environments were under discussion at Stellar in 1987 prior to Craig Upson's arrival. Craig was brought in to contribute his wide experience in scientific user requirements and rendering techniques. He was certainly a key contributor to defining those requirements and establishing what scientists wanted to do and the kind of environment they needed. His position was that of Visualization Scientist in the Marketing group. He worked alongside the AVS engineering team discussing functionality and working with various prototypes of AVS. The development team was led by Rob Gurwitz and then Dave Kamins. Craig Upson played a limited role in AVS implementation. With the exception of the VBUFFER module for volume visualization, there is almost no code written by Craig in AVS. '...using an interconnection mechanism invented by SGI's own Paul Haeberli' Both ConMan and AVS are implementations of visual programming interfaces for data flow execution models, a concept which has been described and implemented in numerous forms over the past 15 - 20 years. AVS is a released product, ConMan, so far as we are aware, is not. Neither can claim to have 'invented' this approach. Prior work of which we are aware includes: a project called EOM by Paul Pangaro for the MIT Architecture Machine in the mid 1970's; Shane Robison (now at Apple) wrote his master's thesis project on a graphical network editor for the Data Flow project for Al Davis (1981); the PS300 Function Network Editor written in 1983 for E&S by Dave Schlegel (a member of the AVS development team). Many of these earlier implementations, including ConMan, were referenced in the AVS team's paper 'The Application Visualization System: A Computational Environment for Scientific Visualization (IEEE CG&A, July 1988). See Nan Shu's book, "Visual Programming", pp 173, Data Flow Diagrams. (Van Nostrand Reinhold, N.Y.,1988) for further information on data flow approaches to visual programming and Brad Myers' "Taxonomies of Visual Programming and Program Visualization", Journal of Visual Languages and Computing (1990), 1, 97-123. Customers, other vendors and co-workers in the visualization field have recognised AVS as the most innovative, functional and extensible heterogeneous visualization environment available today. It has been ported onto five different systems and further ports are underway. The AVS development team is expanding rapidly and working with AVS licensees and customers in extending the platform support and functionality of the product. Ian Reid Stardent Computer