Image V3.1 General Info

History of Image

• the first ever version of a program like Image was written by John Sulston et al. in FORTRAN to run on a VAX machine.
  The program consisted of several parts with meaningful names like t12dns, d9ar etc.

  In those days the whole mapping was done on the VAX using Contig9 for the contig assembly and a script that controlled the image processing modules for the data gathering.

  Image3.1 still carries historical birthmarks from this software from some 15 years ago.

• In 1993 the first approach was made to move the image processing on to the UNIX machines. Richard Durbin wrote a little program image.c which displayed a rotated .dat-image, and superimposed the sample from the .fea-file on top. This early attempt also had a somewhat crude TAR-mode for editing the sample bands.

  The rather unfortunate naming of that file ("image.c") means that this program is still named Image, which isn't really very descriptive.

• Based on this initial image.c program, Friedemann Wobus wrote a full program to display all data output from the VAX analysis programs.

• Gradually the FORTRAN programs were converted into C and incorporated into Image. Each of the analysis steps could now be called by the click of a button. This was the first official release Image 1.0

• More and more features were added to Image1.0 and the file formats changed. The first usable version of Image was Image 2.0, which is still used in a few places.

  Versions 2.1 to 2.3 contained bug-fixes and new features as fpc slowly came along, which is the UNIX replacement for Contig9.

• In late summer 1995, Friedemann went off to rewrite all the Image code. The window layout was changed and cleaned up, and for the first time new analysis functions were tried out.

  This was a first prototype version 3.0 beta, which was never released, because it didn't work the whole way from scanning to output to the database.

• Spring 1996:
  A new approach was designed by Friedemann Wobus and Darren Platt.

  Darren converted the new analysis functions from the beta prototype into c++ and made them into command line programs.
  Friedemann redesigned the whole concept of the window layout into a system inspired by the MS-Excel ChartWizard. From now on, Image would mainly use only one main window and also make excessive use of subwindows.

  The user is guided through the image analysis by [Next] and [Prev] from Step to Step, where each Step calls the external analysis program, reads its results and displays it graphically plus providing a manual editor for the data just generated.