Golden Software
 | |
| Private company | |
| Industry | Scientific Software |
| Founded | 1983 |
| Headquarters | 809 14th Street, Golden, Colorado, USA 80401 |
Key people |
Patrick Madison, (President) Dan Smith, (Lead Developer) |
| Slogan | Great Software Since 1983! |
| Website | goldensoftware.com |
Golden Software Inc. is a privately held, American company based in Golden, Colorado. It develops and markets a small catalog of GIS and scientific software.
Founded in 1983, Golden Software is one of the world's oldest software companies, and the first to market three-dimensional surface and contour mapping applications for the PC.[1]
History
Patrick Madison, a CSM computer science instructor, and Dan Smith, a graduate student, began a partnership in 1983 with the development of a printer interface language that took advantage of the full resolution available to dot-matrix printers.
Their first commercial program, PlotCall, transformed plotter instructions into dot-matrix instructions compatible with over 20 commercial printers.[2] This opened the computer graphing and mapping market to the wider arena of users with inexpensive commercial printers.
Between 1985 and 1986 the company released two DOS applications: Surfer, a surface and contour mapping program, and Grapher, a spreadsheet-plotting application.
In 1990 it released its first Windows program: MapViewer. Their next product, Didger was released in 1996.
Their most recent programs, Strater and Voxler began shipping in 2004 and 2006.
Products
Golden Software programs are used in a wide variety of professional geological applications. They have been described as "user-friendly and accessible".[3]
- PlotCall a DOS graphics-printing program
- Surfer, a surface- and contour-mapping program[4]
- Grapher, a plotting application
- MapViewer, a georeferencing cartography program
- Didger, a georeferencing, map and log digitizing, and coordinate-conversion package
- Strater, a well and borehole logging application
- Voxler, a 3D volumetric modeling and analysis program
References
- ↑ Graham, Steve (February 15, 2007). "Mapping a global business model". Mile High News. p. 23.
- ↑ "PC: the independent guide to IBM personal computers". PC: the Independent Guide to IBM Personal Computers (San Francisco, Calif.: Software Communications, c1982) 3: 170, 381. March 1984. ISSN 0745-2500.
- ↑ Amantov, Aleksey. "Golden Software Products: from Ordinary Geological Tasks to Experimental Maps". Retrieved 2008-10-24.
- ↑ Hincapie, Jaime Omar (2008). Shallow Geophysical Techniques Applied to Archaeology, Economic Geology, and Groundwater Resources. ProQuest. p. 40. ISBN 9780549587835. Retrieved 2013-06-18.
Golden Software Surfer Surfer® is a data contouring program that produces 2D plots from 3D scattered data. It can implement a variety of data gridding and filtering algorithms, and it can display contour maps, colored maps, shaded relief maps and 3D surfaces.
- "Golden Software History". Retrieved 2014-08-04.
- Grant, Felix. "Visualisation: Golden Software". Software Reviews. Scientific Computing World. Retrieved 2008-10-24.