BRL-CAD Description Information
===============================

Included below are descriptions of and information about BRL-CAD that
may be useful as a broad overview to the project or for when preparing
materials for informational websites, software distribution sites,
package management systems, release announcement materials, and more.


TABLE OF CONTENTS
-----------------
  Introduction
  Table of Contents
  History
  Project Name
  Internet Resources
  Keywords & Categories
  Terse Description (70 characters or less)
  Short Description (255 characters or less)
  Brief Description (512 characters or less)
  Whole Description


HISTORY
-------

"The future exists first in the imagination,
then in the will, then in reality."
		- Mike Muuss

BRL-CAD was originally conceived and written for the most part by the
late Michael John Muuss.  He is the original primary architect and
author.  The package was improved upon over the years by Mike and the
Advanced Computer Systems Team at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory,
as well as by many other collaborators around the world.  Today, the
package continues to be developed as an internationally distributed
open source project.

The initial architecture and design of BRL-CAD began in 1979.
Development as a unified package began in 1983.  The first public
release was made in 1984.  BRL-CAD became an open source project on
December 21, 2004.


PROJECT NAME
------------

The proper name of the project is "BRL-CAD", with specific importance
to spell the name in uppercase and utilizing a hyphen.  The "BRL-CAD"
name should be used for all materials that will be publicly displayed
or published.

While it is acceptible to use the unhypenated and lowercase "brlcad"
name for files and directories that refer to the package,
e.g. brlcad-7.8.2.tar.gz will compile and install into the /usr/brlcad
directory by default, the "BRL-CAD" name should be used as the
official name of the project wherever possible unless technical
limitations prohibit it.

Unacceptible variations of the project name include BRLCAD, BrlCAD,
BrlCad, Brlcad, BRLcad, BrlCAD, Brl-CAD, Brl-Cad, Brl-cad, etc.

Incorrect albeit perhaps humorous mispronunciations overheard include
"burl cad", "burly cad", "brill cad", "brail cad", just "be are el"
and other variations without the "cad" designation, and of course
"brazilian real canadian dollars".

BRL-CAD is correctly pronounced as "be are el cad".

The origins of the project name "BRL-CAD" comes from the
computer-aided design (CAD) software package's origins at the
U.S. Army Ballistics Research Laboratory (BRL).  BRL was later renamed
and reorganized into the U.S. Army Research Laboratory to reflect the
diverse technological and scientific research being conducted at the
laboratory.  The project name continues to this day with the BRL
designation as a matter of historic heritage and associated trademark
name recognition.


INTERNET RESOURCES
------------------

Main Website: http://brlcad.org/
Website Mirror: http://ftp.brlcad.org/
Sourceforge Project Site: http://sourceforge.net/projects/brlcad/
Freshmeat Entry: http://freshmeat.net/projects/BRL-CAD/
Commercial Support: http://brlcad.com/

Bug Reports: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=105292&atid=640802
Feature Requests: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=105292&atid=640805
Support Requests: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=105292&atid=640803
Patch Contributions: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=105292&atid=640804

Internet Relay Chat: irc://irc.freenode.net/brlcad i.e. #brlcad on the Freenode network
Mailing Lists: http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=105292
Forums: http://sourceforge.net/forum/?group_id=105292
CVS Access: http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=105292


KEYWORDS & CATEGORIES
---------------------

computer assisted design (CAD), solid modeling, 3D modeling,
rendering, ray-tracing, constructive solid geometry (CSG), graphics,
image manipulation, graphics conversion, geometry conversion,
scientific computing, engineering analysis, visualization,
high-performance computing, benchmark, framebuffer, signal-processing,
symmetric multiprocessing

Languages: C, Tcl, and POSIX UNIX Shell

Predominantly an ISO/ANSI C code heavily utilizing Tcl/Tk for the
predominant interactive solid modeler.  Includes C++ and Java native
interface bindings to a subset of the provided ray-trace and geometry
representation facilities.  Includes a PHP geometry server interface.


TERSE DESCRIPTION
-----------------

BRL-CAD is a powerful cross-platform open source solid modeling system


SHORT DESCRIPTION
-----------------

BRL-CAD is a powerful open source constructive solid geometry solid
modeling system that includes interactive geometry editing,
ray-tracing for rendering & geometric analyses, network distributed
framebuffer support, image & signal-processing tools.


BRIEF DESCRIPTION
-----------------

BRL-CAD is a powerful cross-platform open source combinatorial
Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) solid modeling system that includes
interactive solid geometry editing, ray-tracing support for
rendering and geometric analysis, network-distributed framebuffer
support, image and signal-processing tools, path-tracing support for
realistic image synthesis, a system performance analysis benchmark
suite, an embedded scripting interface, and a robust high-performance
geometric representation and analysis library.


WHOLE DESCRIPTION
-----------------

BRL-CAD is a powerful cross-platform open source combinatorial
Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) solid modeling system that includes
interactive 3D solid geometry editing, a network-distributed
symmetric multiprocessing high-performance ray-tracer,
network-distributed framebuffer support, image and signal-processing
tools, ray-tracing support for rendering and geometric analysis,
path-tracing and photon mapping support for realistic image synthesis,
animation capabilities, ray-tracing and numerical processing
libraries, a system performance analysis benchmark suite, an embedded
scripting interface, and a robust high-performance geometric
representation and analysis library.

BRL-CAD is the primary tri-service solid modeling CAD system used by
the U.S. military to model weapons systems for vulnerability and
lethality analyses.  The solid modeling system is frequently used in a
wide range of military and industrial application including in the
design and analysis of vehicles, mechanical parts, and architecture.
The package has also been used in radiation dose planning, medical
visualization, computer graphics education, CSG concepts and modeling
education, and system performance benchmark testing among other
purposes.

Actively developed since 1979, BRL-CAD is a collection of more than
400 tools, utilities, and applications comprising more than a million
lines of source code.  BRL-CAD supports a great variety of geometric
representations including an extensive set of traditional CSG
primitive implicit solids such as boxes, ellipsoids, cones, and tori,
as well as explicit solids made from closed collections of Uniform
B-Spline Surfaces, Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline (NURBS) surfaces,
n-Manifold Geometry (NMG), and purely faceted mesh geometry.  All
geometric objects may be combined using boolean set-theoretic CSG
operations including union, intersection, and difference.

BRL-CAD has been under active development for more than 20 years with
a portability heritage that includes systems such as a DEC VAX-11/780
running 4.3 BSD; DECStations running ULTRIX; Silicon Graphics 3030, 4D
"IRIS", O2, Onyx, and Origin systems running various versions of IRIX;
Sun Microsystems Sun-3 and Sun-4 Sparcs running SunOS; the Cray 1,
Cray X-MP, Cray Y-MP, and Cray 2 running UNICOS; DEC Alpha AXP running
OSF/1; Apple Macintosh II running A/UX; iPSC/860 Hypercube running
NX/2; the Alliant FX/8, FX/80, and FX/2800; Gould/Encore SEL PowerNode
6000/9000 and NP1; NeXT workstations; IBM RS/6000; HPPA 9000/700
running HPUX; Ardent/Stardent; Encore Multi-Max; and much much more.
BRL-CAD's extensive portability of course also includes a plethora of
common desktop and server versions of BSD, IRIX, Solaris, Mac OS X,
Linux, and Windows.

The BRL-CAD package is intentionally designed to be extensively
cross-platform and is actively developed on and maintained for many
common operating system environments including for BSD, IRIX, Linux,
Solaris, Mac OS X, and Windows among others.  The entire package is
distributed in binary and source code form as free open source
software (FOSS), provided under Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved
license terms.  BRL-CAD was released as open source in December 2004
with portions licensed under the GPL, LGPL, GFDL, and BSD licenses.
See the COPYING file for more details.
