RE: A little bit of history: Life before and after EPICS...

[Emmanuel Mayssat <emayssat@outlook.com>]

http://www.aps.anl.gov/epics/EpicsDocumentation/EpicsGeneral/epics_success.html
The detailed story of the birth of EPICS.

Enjoy!
--
Emmanuel

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From: dalesio@bnl.gov
To: emayssat@outlook.com; tech-talk@aps.anl.gov
Subject: RE: A little bit of history: Life before and after EPICS...
Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2013 01:20:10 +0000

No one was directed to use EPICS from the DoE. People that joined, did so to reduce their cost and risk. Marty Knott from the APS published a paper on this savings at an ICALEPCS conference. The number that sticks in my mind - was $1M on software development costs. Subsequent laboratories had a greater benefit as after this first phase, the Channel Access Protocol, the Process Database, a good suite of hardware drivers,  the state notation language, and a set of client tools that were adequate. Many project were able to use this version with moderate development for integrating new hardware devices. A limitation was that the process database only ran on vxWorks. 

When those of us that developed the predecessor, GTA Control System, we presented it at the ICALEPCS in 1989 at Vancouver. Marty Knott, the control group leader for the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory, and his engineers were ready to develop their own control system. Marty Kraimer was tasked with evaluating GTACS. Argonne decided to work with us to further develop GTACS and the result of that was EPICS. There are some other early papers that were written about collaborating. They are ICALEPCS papers as I recall.

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From: Emmanuel Mayssat [emayssat@outlook.com]
Sent: Monday, September 30, 2013 7:10 PM
To: Dalesio, Leo; tech-talk@aps.anl.gov
Subject: RE: A little bit of history: Life before and after EPICS...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPICS
The wikipedia page on EPICS is rather short on content.
With all the information that was shared, I certainly could update it.

One key piece of information I am still missing though:
did EPICS grow on his own (i.e. was best control system among many)
or did the DOE specifically ordered top managers at its facilities to reduce development cost through code-reuse?
Why did the development pattern (everyone develops everything) change in the early 1990's?


--
Emmanuel