The 80's

As the 70's ended and the 80's began, software began to evolve very rapidly. With UNIX and C on minicomputers and Basic and Pascal on microcomputers, along with spreadsheets, and with projects like Numerical Recipes and other FORTRAN library projects, individual end users could begin to write very sophisticated software. Even more importantly - the APRANET began to evolve to a point where software and ideas could be exchanged between scientists, much more easily.

BUT, large calculations required large mini or mainframe computers and these were still in the the control of campus computer committees and others. I tried to find software that would work on a computer I could control. In 1982, I contacted Professor Veltman (who incidentally won the 1999 Nobel Prize for Physics I am very pleased to say). He told me about a researcher at Caltech who had written something called SMP in C for the VAX that might be something I could use. His name was