July 29 was the 30th birthday of GRASS (Geographic Resources Analysis Support System), what I believe is the first free and open source Geographic Information System (GIS) software package. GRASS is a member of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo).
Thirty years ago, on 29 July 1983, the user manual for a new system titled “GIS Version 1 Reference Manual” was first published by J. Westervelt and M. O’Shea. Prior to that in 1982, Lloyd Van Warren, and engineering student at the University of Illinois (Champaign/Urbana), had began developing a new computer program based on a master’s thesis by Jim Westervelt that described am analytic geospatial package called LAGRID (Landscape Architecture Gridcell analysis system).
Further development of the software package was by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (USA/CERL) in Champaign. Version 1.0 was released in 1985 under the name Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (GRASS). In the mid 1990s development transferred from USA/CERL to the Open GRASS Consortium.
In 1999 GRASS GIS was released under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
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