Dear Friends-of-FITS,

I have always considered March 28th to be the birthday of FITS,
because the original Basic FITS Agreement was finalized on 1979-03-28
('28/03/79' old-style). So today is the 25th birthday of the FITS
Agreement.

Those of you who are not familiar with the history of how the
Agreement was reached, and how it came to be the standard for
astronomical data, can consult two different versions of that history:

1) Eric's FITS history

Eric Greisen, the other negotiator for the Agreement, has produced
an excellent review of the origin, role and nature of the FITS
Agreements during the past 25 years. It was published two years
ago as a chapter in an astronomical history book edited by Andre
Heck. A link to the document is available on Eric's web page, at

http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/~egreisen

2) Don's FITS history

In 1992 I posted a description of early FITS documents which were,
and still are, in my files. This document will tell you about the
'pre-history' of FITS, including such details as the reasoning
behind the 2880-byte record size, the original proposal for keyword
length, and an interesting coincidence of notable historical events
that happened 25 years ago today. See

http://www.cv.nrao.edu/fits/document...s/history.news
or
http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/birthday.news

Best regards,
Don Wells
--
Donald C. Wells Scientist
http://www.cv.nrao.edu/~dwells
National Radio Astronomy Observatory +1-434-296-0277
520 Edgemont Road, Charlottesville, Virginia 22903-2475 USA