Friends I see that folk have been having fun during my recent EMC email lapse. (My last web identity got sold to a mega corp that I don't care to be the servant of.)
Some may remember me as an early adopter of EMC along with the likes of Matt Shaver, Jon Elson, Dan Falck and several others so I know just a bit about this EMC history thing and offer the following brief perspective from my own experience. We should first talk ancient history here. So let me section off the next few comments just that as opposed to history or opinion. ANCIENT HISTORY It is correct that the original code for the Enhanced Machine Controller was written by a group of WAY bright guys. I'm talking long before the SourceForge repository came into existence. And yep a bunch of them held the most advanced degree they could get in their respective field and had published some pretty damned impressive stuff. I listened to several of these guys and was always surprised at their personal commitment to the EMC project. In that age we all submitted our code changes to Will Shackleford at NIST (The USA National Institute for Standards and Technology) and he kept the master files on his workstation named "spinnerfen." I don't exactly know how that repository worked but seem to remember sitting beside Fred Proctor at The NIST when he made changes to it from his own desktop machine. I also know that many source commits came from folk at agencies outside the US that were, for their own countries, equivalent to NIST. I can say with some assurance that the intent of the work of Tom Kramer on the EMC interpreters was to develop a standard -- that's a part of the business a government office named in part "standards" is all about. That standard was to be named RS174NGC. The NGC standing for Next Generation Controller. It is true that that work was never adopted by any standards publisher like DIN. Thanks to Matt, EMC code was made public, applied to low end computers and hardware and there was an great gathering of garage/basement shop guys from many countries and backgrounds. The code was moved by NIST to SourceForge and the rest is history rather than ancient history. HISTORY It's true that the gcode interpreter named RS274NGC has evolved since NIST. Bright guys like Ken Lerman and Keith Rumley made modifications to it to fit additional needs. After all, the quickest way for a species to become extinct is to refuse to evolve to meet changing circumstance. The same is true, in a way, of software. The software exception is to delay extinction when huge monied interests attempt to stand in the way of change or attempt to steer the direction of change. (I stole these thoughts from Eric Raymond so must attribute them here.) I don't believe that any of the original authors are threatened by the change. In fact there are quite a number of us that attended the FEST at the NIST campus in Maryland several years ago and may remember hearing Fred say that perhaps we should throw out the code and work from the experience we had gained from it to write new. It pleases me that we have not done that. Yes we have written many of the abilities of the old system using new systems. The pioneering Hardware Abstraction Layer work headed up by John Kasunich is a good example of a conceptual revolution in our code. We have chosen an incremental change model, evolution, that will eventually give us completely new code for doing machine control. IMO I'm winding down now but must offer a final comparison between ancient history and what is now. Code growth and maturity in the last couple of years has been awesome! Did you get that -- AWESOME! And I want to be one vote of thanks for the thousands of hours spent by well intentioned EMC folk to make that maturity possible. Each one using it, developing it, writing (manuals, man pages, wikis, web sites) or thinking about it, pushes it to be better. In spite of what any one person might say, it's open -- as in open to ideas and code. It's open in that we all stand as equal in this endeavor. These days it takes quit a lot to get the hackles of this old junk yard dog up but attempting to denigrate our project and our current collection of WAY bright people might just do it. Someone I'd worked with years ago to get a Servo-To-Go system running called me this morning with a new project. He asked if he should step up to Ubuntu/EMC2 and I answered, Yep. He asked in a sort of round about way if I'd go back to the old EMC code and I answered, No F&%$#&g Way! There are just to many advantages with the way we do machine control these days. As Elizabeth Barrett Browning once wrote, "I love thee (EMC2) to the depth and breadth and height ..." () supplied. Maybe I don't have enough to do.... If you reply, please snip. Rayh ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
