page_title: BRL-CAD
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: BRL-CAD / History
caption_attribution_description: Left: Michael John Muuss operating Vector General display of the XM1 (M1 Abrams prototype) tank with BRL-CAD circa 1980. Right: Earl Weaver, inspecting printout of XM1 design. Source Image provided by Christopher Sean Morrison from the historic archives of Mike Muuss, edited from scanned original. Image has been published by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory in official reports as well as part of an ARL History of Computing project started by Muuss. 50 Years of Army Computing, From ENIAC to MSRC. (ARL-SR-93, ed. T.J. Bergin): http://www.arl.army.mil/main/main/DownloadedInternetPages/CurrentPages/AboutARL/eniac.pdf History of Computing: http://www.arl.army.mil/main/main/default.cfm?Action=20&amp;Page=148 http://ftp.arl.army.mil/ftp/historic-computers/jpeg/pdp11,70.jpg Cute Things in Picture: Note the thermometer stuck in the top of the 11/70 CPU. The gold bumper sticker at the top of the rack says "Quiet, genius at work." The picture is taken in room 100 building 394 at APG. The Vector General graphics system were supposed to be peripherals for BRL's CDC Cyber but they never worked for that. Each one came with an 11/34 CPU, a DQ-11, and 56K modem. Of course, Mike and his group immediately just put UNIX on the 11/34's. The 11/34 and the comm gear were subsequently used by me for internet routers.
context_page_description: BRL-CAD is a constructive solid geometry solid modeling computer-aided design system. It includes an interactive geometry editor, ray tracing support for graphics rendering and geometric analysis, computer network distributed framebuffer support, scripting, image-processing and signal-processing tools. The entire package is distributed in source code and binary form.
  Although BRL-CAD can be used for a variety of engineering and graphics applications, the package's primary purpose continues to be the support of ballistic and electromagnetic analyses. In keeping with the Unix philosophy of developing independent tools to perform single, specific tasks and then linking the tools together in a package, BRL-CAD is basically a collection of libraries, tools, and utilities that work together to create, raytrace, and interrogate geometry and manipulate files and data. In contrast to many other 3D modelling applications, BRL-CAD primarily uses CSG rather than boundary representation. This means BRL-CAD can "study physical phenomena such as ballistic penetration and thermal, radiative, neutron, and other types of transport". It does also support boundary representation.
context_section_description: In 1979, the U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL) – now the United States Army Research Laboratory – expressed a need for tools that could assist with the computer simulation and engineering analysis of combat vehicle systems and environments.  When no CAD package was found to be adequate for this purpose, BRL software developers – led by Mike Muuss – began assembling a suite of utilities capable of interactively displaying, editing, and interrogating geometric models.  This suite became known as BRL-CAD. Development on BRL-CAD as a package subsequently began in 1983; the first public release was made in 1984.  BRL-CAD became an open-source project in December 2004.
  The BRL-CAD source code repository is the oldest known public version-controlled codebase in the world that's still under active development, dating back to 1983-12-16 00:10:31 UTC.
caption: Lead developer Mike Muuss works on the XM-1 tank in BRL‑CAD on a PDP‑11/70 computer system, circa 1980.
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