westerve@ZORRO.CECER.ARMY.MIL (Jim Westervelt) (04/11/90)
Archive-name: grass/10-Apr-90 Original-posting-by: westerve@ZORRO.CECER.ARMY.MIL (Jim Westervelt) Original-subject: GRASS Archive-site: uxc.cso.uiuc.edu [128.174.5.50] Archive-directory: pub/grass Reposted-by: emv@math.lsa.umich.edu (Edward Vielmetti) I have just joined this mailing group and would like to start by introducing a public domain raster based GIS called GRASS. Some highlights: Raster based GIS Significant (but not complete) image processing About 200 different commands Source code available UNIX based Written in C About 20 man years of programming Under continual development Biggest users: Universities, National Parks, county SCS offices, Army Corps Relatively easily ported to different UNIX color workstations Has been ported to 10-15 different platforms Code available via anonymous FTP from uxc.cso.uiuc.edu:pub/grass (Note that manuals should be purchased ($25 I believe)) Complete sample data bases (Black Hills, SD) available, incl. imagery Large sample world data base should be available soon Gobs of government documentation; even a doucment describing it all User's manual Programmer's manual Quarterly newsletter Notable workstations include Sun, Masscomp, Silicon Graphics, Apollo, DEC, Data General, IBM 600, 386 machines (running UNIX). A hardware configuration guide is available. The GRASS Information office is run by Kathy Norman: 1-800-USA-CERL ext. 220 email: kathy@cerl.cecer.army.mil Workstation vendors seem most interested in giving significant price breaks on their products to Universities. Call them all if you want to move away from the DOS world and see what kind of deal you can cut. With some local computer support you will be able to inexpensively run the very powerful GRASS package. If you later feel guilty about saving tens of thousands of dollars on your GIS acquisition, we'll encourage you to participate in the share-ware product by submitting new code developed at your site.