Rosevear Software is a big project that I've been dragging
behind me, sometimes pushing in front of me, like an anchor (link to
an appropriate theme song) since about 1992. That was the
year I left General Dynamics Corporation where I was an Engineer for
the Advanced Structures Analysis Group of Space Systems Division (link
to a similar, currently active group). I was a stress
engineer, but I was also a self-appointed computer liaison for the
group. I served the group and satisfied my own ambitions by
dabbling in Fortran on Apollo mini
computers, VAX VMS
machines, and a CDC Cyber mainframe,
and twiddling with Unix (technically, it was AEGIS).
One of my twiddles was a system called SAM. SAM was an
acronym for Structural Analysis Menu, but the original SAM wasn't my
software; I'm pretty sure it was written by Gerry Norvell (I hope he
doesn't mind my mentioning his name) and maybe others at General
Dynamics, Fort Worth Division. It was a system which provided a
single point of access to a collection of structrual analysis
programs. I was tasked with creating a similar system for our
group in San Diego. This was a difficult task, and my results,
though successful, were small in scope and somewhat clumsy in
operation. Later, after parting with General Dynamics, I returned
to this task on my own time. This effort resulted in a totally
new system, similar only in name and paradigm, which after many years
of development and testing I have recently re-published on SourceForge.
(Get SAM
here.) It was originally published on SourceForge in
2007. Note that my system retains the paradigm of the original
system--that is it provides a way of managing a collection of
executables in a menu-like fashion. It could well be applied to
the task of managing a collection of structural analysis software, but
it has nothing at all to do with structural analysis. SAM became my
first Rosevear Software product.
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