Seismic Unix - History

History

Einar Kjartansson began writing what is now called SU (the SY package) in the late 1970s while still a graduate student at Jon Claerbout's Stanford Exploration Project (SEP). He continued to expand the package while he was a professor at the University of Utah in the early eighties. In 1984, during an extended visit to SEP Einar introduced SY to Shuki Ronen, then a graduate student at Stanford. Ronen further developed SY from 1984 to 1986. Other students at SEP started to use it and contributed code and ideas. SY was inspired by much other software developed at SEP and benefited from the foundations laid by Claerbout and many of his students; Rob Clayton, Stew Levin, Dave Hale, Jeff Thorson, Chuck Sword, and others who pioneered seismic processing on Unix in the seventies and early eighties.

In 1986, Shuki Ronen brought this work to the CWP at Colorado School of Mines during his one year postdoctoral appointment there, Ronen aided Cohen in turning SU into a supportable and exportable product.

Chris Liner (homepage), while a student at the Center, contributed to many of the graphics codes used in the pre-workstation (i.e, graphics terminal) age of SU. Liner continues to promote the use of SU in his students' research at the University of Houston.

Craig Artley, now with the Landmark division of Halliburton, made major contributions to the graphics codes while still a student at CWP and continues to make significant contributions to the general package.

Dave Hale wrote several of the heavy lifting processing codes as well as most of the core scientific and graphics libraries.

John Stockwell's involvement with SU began in 1989. He was largely responsible for the Makefile in the package. He has been the main contact for the project since the first public release of SU in September 1992 (Release 17). After Jack Cohen's death in 1996, Stockwell assumed the role of principal investigator of the SU project and has since remained in that. The number of lines of code have more than tripled in the 11 years.

There have been many contributors to SU over the past two decades.

Read more about this topic:  Seismic Unix

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    Don’t you realize that this is a new empire? Why, folks, there’s never been anything like this since creation. Creation, huh, that took six days, this was done in one. History made in an hour. Why it’s a miracle out of the Old Testament!
    Howard Estabrook (1884–1978)

    Perhaps universal history is the history of the diverse intonation of some metaphors.
    Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)

    It may be well to remember that the highest level of moral aspiration recorded in history was reached by a few ancient Jews—Micah, Isaiah, and the rest—who took no count whatever of what might not happen to them after death. It is not obvious to me why the same point should not by and by be reached by the Gentiles.
    Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)