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<h2>22. History and Acknowledgements
<a name="22. History and Acknowledgements"></a>
</h2>
<p style="margin-top: 1em"><font color="#000000">Original
<b>pic</b> was written to go with Joseph Ossanna’s
original <i>troff</i>(1) by Brian Kernighan, and later
re-written by Kernighan with substantial enhancements
(apparently as part of the evolution of <i>troff</i>(1) into
<i>ditroff</i>(1) to generate device-independent
output).</font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 1em"><font color="#000000">The
language had been inspired by some earlier graphics
languages including <b>ideal</b> and <b>grap</b>. Kernighan
credits Chris van Wyk (the designer of <b>ideal</b>) with
many of the ideas that went into <b>pic</b>.</font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 1em"><font color="#000000">The
<b>pic</b> language was originally described by Brian
Kernighan in Bell Labs Computing Science Technical Report
#116 (you can obtain a PostScript copy of the revised
version, [1], by sending a mail message to
<i>netlib@research.att.com</i> with a body of ‘send
116 from research/cstr’). There have been two
revisions, in 1984 and 1991.</font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 1em"><font color="#000000">The
document you are reading effectively subsumes
Kernighan’s description; it was written to fill in
lacunæ in the exposition and integrate in descriptions
of the GNU <i>gpic</i>(1) and <i>pic2plot</i>(1)
features.</font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 1em"><font color="#000000">The GNU
<b>gpic</b> implementation was written by James Clark ⟨
<i>jjc@jclark.com</i>⟩ .</font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 1em"><font color="#000000">The GNU
<b>pic2plot</b> implementation is based on James
Clark’s parser code and maintained by Robert Maier,
principal author of <b>plotutils</b>.</font></p>
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