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==History==
AIPS is what most of us would now describe as “legacy software”, having been originally coded in a truly ancient dialect of [[FORTRAN]] (predating even the venerable FORTRAN IV). AIPS now uses FORTRAN 77, although it has been digested successfully by at least one FORTRAN 90 compiler.
A Modcomp computer in [[Charlottesville, Virginia]] was the first system to actually host a working AIPS system, and it quickly spread to a guest UNIX system hosted on an IBM 360 mainframe. From there, it spread in the early 1980s to VAX/VMS systems, often with an attached floating-point systems array processor (this peculiar device was the moral equivalent of the 80387 floating-point accelerators that some old-timers may remember being part and parcel of many 386 systems). In the late 1980s, [[UNIX]] came back into AIPS' universe in a big way, first with the Sun-3 series of Motorola-68020-based systems and then with a series of others, including Cray (Unicos), Convex and Alliant systems.
By the time the 1980s were winding down, the dominance of VMS in the AIPS universe was being seriously questioned. Performance on new upstarts like Sun was starting to challenge their price/performance ratio, and the first SPARCstations totally blew them away. In the early 1990s, AIPS moved to a smorgasbord of UNIX variants: AIX, Stardent (briefly), Ultrix, HP-UX, SGI's Irix and DEC (oops, Compaq) OSF1. A port to an IBM 3090 was attempted, but failed due to accuracy problems with the non-IEEE floating-point format thereon. In the middle of this flurry of activity, the port to Linux by Jeff Uphoff was made.
===The Blacksburg Connection===
In the fall of 1993, [[National Radio Astronomy Observatory|NRAO]] got a query from a radio astronomer at [[Virginia Tech]] in [[Blacksburg, Virginia|Blacksburg]], requesting permission for one of his students to copy AIPS to his PC for an attempted port to a new system called [[Linux]]. (At that time, AIPS was still proprietary code, released to non-profit organizations under a rather cumbersome license and user agreement; this changed later.) Polite skepticism was the immediate reaction of most people then in the NRAO AIPS group, but they allowed the experiment to go ahead. Within several weeks Jeff Uphoff had successfully ported the software to Linux and was able to run the “Dirty Dozen Tasks” benchmark, even though it took about a day on a 386 compared with an hour on a SPARC processor.
===Faster and Faster, and Make it GNU===
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