RE: External: Re: [EXTERNAL] History of EPICS

[Russ Berg via Tech-talk <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>]

Hi all,

Sorry Richard when I saw your claim I knew we had you beat 😊, I started at the Canadian Light Source in August 2001 and one of the first things I worked on was the SIS1100/3100 PCI-VME fibre link driver which became the basis of all of our Linux VME EPICS access for the machine and beamlines. I struggled for about 2 months trying to get an RTEMS setup together to port the 1100 driver but even with Erik Norum’s help (I think he had just left to SLAC? when I started) I was not able to get it running properly so a couple of months later (in January of 2002) we switched to using Redhat Linux for the VME driver and all EPICS development with the intention of dealing with a real time solution for VME down the road when the need arose.

 

So I do know that by Jan 2002 all VME access was via SIS1100/3100 from a PC and all IOC’s were running Redhat.

 

As for first light, I believe the Australian Light Source was still under construction at the time because I remember several from Australia joined us for storage commissioning (Mark Boland, Greg Leblanc,..)  

we took first light 2003-12-09, 18:45h.

 

-Russ

 

From: Tech-talk <tech-talk-bounces at aps.anl.gov> On Behalf Of Johnson, Andrew N. via Tech-talk
Sent: February 26, 2025 10:05 AM
To: Richard Farnsworth <rifarnsworth at yahoo.com>
Cc: Nonn, Patrick <patrick.nonn at desy.de>; tech-talk <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>
Subject: External: Re: [EXTERNAL] History of EPICS

 

On 2/26/25, 6:17 AM, Richard Farnsworth wrote:

So I'm claiming "first all-Linux" EPICS machine at first light.  While I'm claiming firsts, I'd also like to try to claim a last. Andrew Johnson might like to check for me this if at all possible, I think we were the last major facility to sign an EPICS license agreement, rather than the current EPICS open licence it is now.

I don’t have the data to confirm that anymore, unfortunately. The two lists of licensees on the APS website are both sorted and don’t contain dates, and I removed the code and database that handled license applications when we switched to the EPICS Open License.

 

- Andrew

-- 

Complexity comes for free, Simplicity you have to work for.