In July 1985 I changed my job from a small institute at the University of
Göttingen to the computer center of the Max Planck Institute for Aeronomy
in Katlenburg-Lindau which is renamed to Max Planck Institute for Solar System
Research in July 2004.
One of my first tasks at the institute in Lindau was the creating of 3-D
colour plots from data of the experiment PICCA on the probe GIOTTO.
I ported a collection of plotting routines written by me at the university to
a Perkin Elmer machine with a Ramtek colour graphics system and released it as
DISLIN 1.0. The name DISLIN is an abbreviation for Device-Independent Software
Lindau. Here is a short summary of all DISLIN releases:
Version |
Date |
Important Changes |
| 1.0 |
Dec-1986 |
The first version of DISLIN is released for plotting axis systems,
secondary axes, titles, colour surfaces and text. |
| 2.0 |
Mar-1987 |
Time labels, bug fixes. |
| 2.1 |
Apr-1987 |
Additional text features, plotting of numbers, bug fixes. |
| 3.0 |
Jun-1987 |
Porting of DISLIN to a VAX 8550 with Metheus colour graphics systems. |
| 3.1 |
Sep-1987 |
First vector fonts, graphical output to a GKSLIN metafile and
Kyocera laserprinters. |
| 3.5 |
Apr-1988 |
Additional features, bug fixes. |
| 4.0 |
Oct-1989 |
Tektronix emulation for graphic terminals, new output formats
CGM and HPGL. |
| 5.0 |
May-1991 |
Support of X11 terminals, PostScript output, a first distribution for
IBM-PCs. |
| 5.1 |
Mar-1993 |
Support of the programming language C. PC distributions for MS C and
gcc. |
| 5.2 |
Jul-1993 |
New features, bug fixes. |
| 6.0 |
Sep-1994 |
New features, bug fixes. |
| 6.1 |
Mar-1995 |
Widget routines for programming graphical user interfaces. |
| 6.2 |
Dec-1995 |
Linux is supported by DISLIN, the DISLIN interpreter DISGCL is released, new features, bug fixes. |
| 6.3 |
Oct-1996 |
A first DISLIN distribution for Fortran 90 is available. |
| 7.0 |
Sep-1998 |
Native libraries for Fortran 90 are available for the most popular
Fortran 90 compilers. Plotting extensions for Perl and Python. |
| 7.1 |
Feb-1999 |
Plotting extension for Java, new features, bug fixes. |
| 7.2 |
Sep-1999 |
PNG support, calendar axes, 3-D bar graphs/pie charts, cursor routines,
quickplots. |
| 7.3 |
Mar-2000 |
New features, bug fixes. |
| 7.4 |
Sep-2000 |
TeX instructions for mathematical formulas, plotting of isosurfaces,
support of PPM files. |
| 7.5 |
May-2001 |
Graphical output to PDF files, Delaunay triangulation. |
| 7.6 |
Feb-2002 |
Import of BMP files, true colour features for image routines. |
| 8.0 |
Oct-2002 |
Polar axis systems, user-defined symbols, support of external
map coordinates. |
| 8.1 |
May-2003 |
Additional labels, 3-D bars, transparency in PNG files. |
| 8.2 |
Feb-2004 |
Bitmap fonts, new widget for scrolled text output. |
| 8.3 |
Feb-2005 |
GIF support, bookmarks for PDF files. |
| 8.4 |
Aug-2005 |
Additional true colour features, support of 64-bit Linux. |
| 9.0 |
Nov-2005 |
DISLIN is now free for non-commercial use. The license check is removed
from the source code. Additional double precision libraries for the most
DISLIN distributions. |
| 9.1 |
Nov-2006 |
Thread-safe C libraries, additional text features, explicit-shape
interfaces for all Fortran 90/95 libraries. |
| 9.2 |
Oct-2007 |
Additional 3-D and map features. |
| 9.3 |
Apr-2008 |
Transparency, additional widget features. |
| 9.4 |
Oct-2008 |
Table widgets, additional cursor features. |
| 9.5 |
Apr-2009 |
Vector fields, Unicode, map features. |
| 10.0 |
Jan-2010 |
Visualization of vector fields, plotting streamlines. |
| 10.1 |
Feb-2011 |
OpenGL driver for hardware acceleration, financial bars, 3-D contours. |
| 10.2 |
Nov-2011 |
Additional widget features, bug fixes. |
| 10.3 |
Jan-2013 |
Reading TrueType fonts, importing PNG and TIFF files,
additional widget features, bug fixes. |
