A Short History of DISLIN
In July 1985 I changed my job from a small institute at the University of Göttingen to the computer center of the Max Planck Institute for Aeronomy in Katlenburg-Lindau which is renamed to Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in July 2004.
One of my first tasks at the institute in Lindau was the creating of 3-D colour plots from data of the experiment PICCA on the probe GIOTTO. I ported a collection of plotting routines written by me at the university to a Perkin Elmer machine with a Ramtek colour graphics system and released it as DISLIN 1.0. The name DISLIN is an abbreviation for Device-Independent Software Lindau. Here is a short summary of all DISLIN releases:
Version | Date | Important Changes |
|---|---|---|
| 1.0 | Dec-1986 | The first version of DISLIN is released for plotting axis systems, secondary axes, titles, colour surfaces and text. |
| 2.0 | Mar-1987 | Time labels, bug fixes. |
| 2.1 | Apr-1987 | Additional text features, plotting of numbers, bug fixes. |
| 3.0 | Jun-1987 | Porting of DISLIN to a VAX 8550 with Metheus colour graphics systems. |
| 3.1 | Sep-1987 | First vector fonts, graphical output to a GKSLIN metafile and Kyocera laserprinters. |
| 3.5 | Apr-1988 | Additional features, bug fixes. |
| 4.0 | Oct-1989 | Tektronix emulation for graphic terminals, new output formats CGM and HPGL. |
| 5.0 | May-1991 | Support of X11 terminals, PostScript output, a first distribution for IBM-PCs. |
| 5.1 | Mar-1993 | Support of the programming language C. PC distributions for MS C and gcc. |
| 5.2 | Jul-1993 | New features, bug fixes. |
| 6.0 | Sep-1994 | New features, bug fixes. |
| 6.1 | Mar-1995 | Widget routines for programming graphical user interfaces. |
| 6.2 | Dec-1995 | Linux is supported by DISLIN, the DISLIN interpreter DISGCL is released, new features, bug fixes. |
| 6.3 | Oct-1996 | A first DISLIN distribution for Fortran 90 is available. |
| 7.0 | Sep-1998 | Native libraries for Fortran 90 are available for the most popular Fortran 90 compilers. Plotting extensions for Perl and Python. |
| 7.1 | Feb-1999 | Plotting extension for Java, new features, bug fixes. |
| 7.2 | Sep-1999 | PNG support, calendar axes, 3-D bar graphs/pie charts, cursor routines, quickplots. |
| 7.3 | Mar-2000 | New features, bug fixes. |
| 7.4 | Sep-2000 | TeX instructions for mathematical formulas, plotting of isosurfaces, support of PPM files. |
| 7.5 | May-2001 | Graphical output to PDF files, Delaunay triangulation. |
| 7.6 | Feb-2002 | Import of BMP files, true colour features for image routines. |
| 8.0 | Oct-2002 | Polar axis systems, user-defined symbols, support of external map coordinates. |
| 8.1 | May-2003 | Additional labels, 3-D bars, transparency in PNG files. |
| 8.2 | Feb-2004 | Bitmap fonts, new widget for scrolled text output. |
| 8.3 | Feb-2005 | GIF support, bookmarks for PDF files. |
| 8.4 | Aug-2005 | Additional true colour features, support of 64-bit Linux. |
| 9.0 | Nov-2005 | DISLIN is now free for non-commercial use. The license check is removed from the source code. Additional double precision libraries for the most DISLIN distributions. |
| 9.1 | Nov-2006 | Thread-safe C libraries, additional text features, explicit-shape interfaces for all Fortran 90/95 libraries. |
| 9.2 | Oct-2007 | Additional 3-D and map features. |
| 9.3 | Apr-2008 | Transparency, additional widget features. |
| 9.4 | Oct-2008 | Table widgets, additional cursor features. |
| 9.5 | Apr-2009 | Vector fields, Unicode, map features. |
| 10.0 | Jan-2010 | Visualization of vector fields, plotting streamlines. |
| 10.1 | Feb-2011 | OpenGL driver for hardware acceleration, financial bars, 3-D contours. |
| 10.2 | Nov-2011 | Additional widget features, bug fixes. |
| 10.3 | Jan-2013 | Reading TrueType fonts, importing PNG and TIFF files, additional widget features, bug fixes. |
| 10.4 | Jan-2014 | Orthographic projections, additional widget features, bug fixes. |
| 10.5 | Jan-2015 | Small feature enhancement, bug fixes. |
| 10.6 | Jan-2016 | Additional widget features, small feature enhancement, bug fixes. |