A Short History of DISLIN

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. The distribution rights werde given to Garching Innovation (Max-Planck-Innovation since 2006) to enable DISLIN to be licensed.
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. Max-Planck-Innovation continues to issue licenses for commercial applications. 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.
10.4 Jan-2014 Orthographic projections, additional widget features, bug fixes.
10.5 Jan-2015 Small feature enhancement, bug fixes.
10.6 Jan-2016 Additional widget features, small feature enhancement, bug fixes.
11.0 Feb-2017 Reading FITS files, bug fixes.
11.1 Feb-2018 Contours on curvilinear grids, bug fixes.
11.2 Feb-2019 Smith charts, additional cursor features, import of images into a 3D plane, bug fixes.
11.3 Mar-2020 The DISLIN license has changed. DISLIN can now be used freely without any restrictions. Bug fixes.
11.3.1 Apr-2020 I am in retirement and have left the Max-Planck-Institute for Solar System Research. The company Dislin Software is founded to continue the development and support of DISLIN.
11.3.2 May-2020 New features for legends and Smith-Charts.
11.3.3 Jun-2020 Legends can be plotted in table form, en in Tabellenform, TIFF files organized in tiles can be processed, bug fixes.
11.3.3 Jan-2021 All rights to DISLIN have been transferred back to the author of DISLIN by Max-Planck-Innovation.
11.4 Mar-2021 Background images for main widgets. Support of Windows Enhanced Metafiles (EMF). Bug fixes.
11.5 Mar-2022 Minor software changes and bug fixes. Support of current versions for Perl, Python, Ruby, Go, Julia and R.