History
The first version of GEANT dates back to 1974. Versions of GEANT through 3.21 were written in FORTRAN and eventually maintained as part of CERNLIB. Since about 2000, the last FORTRAN release has been essentially in stasis and receives only occasional bug fixes. GEANT3 is, however, still in use by some experiments. Most of GEANT3 is available under the GNU General Public License, with the exception of some hadronic interaction code contributed by the FLUKA collaboration.
The latest generation of the software is Geant4 (when referring to this version, the name is typically no longer capitalized). It is a complete rewrite in C++ with a modern object-oriented design. Geant4 was developed by the RD44 collaboration in 1994-1998 and is being maintained and improved now by the Geant4 collaboration. For quite some time Geant4 did not have a clearly defined software license. As of version 8.1 (released June 30, 2006) this omission has been remedied. Geant4 is now available under the Geant4 Software License.
Read more about this topic: GEANT (program)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“They are a sort of post-house,where the Fates
Change horses, making history change its tune,
Then spur away o’er empires and o’er states,
Leaving at last not much besides chronology,
Excepting the post-obits of theology.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)