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  <info>
    <title>About BRL-CAD</title>

    <author>
      <personname>
	<firstname>Christopher</firstname>
	<othername>Sean</othername>
	<surname>Morrison</surname>
      </personname>

      <affiliation>
	<address>
	  <orgname>BRL-CAD Open Source</orgname>
	  <email>devs@brlcad.org</email>
	</address>
      </affiliation>
    </author>
  </info>

  <section xml:id="article-body">
    
    <para>
      BRL-CAD is a powerful cross-platform Open Source combinatorial
      Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) solid modeling system that
      includes interactive 3D solid geometry editing, high-performance
      ray-tracing support for rendering and geometric analysis,
      network-distributed framebuffer support, image and
      signal-processing tools, path-tracing and photon mapping support
      for realistic image synthesis, a system performance analysis
      benchmark suite, an embedded scripting interface, and libraries
      for robust high-performance geometric representation and
      analysis.
    </para>

    <para>
      For more than 20 years, BRL-CAD has been 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, academic, and industrial applications 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.
    </para>

    <para>
      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.
    </para>

    <para>
      BRL-CAD has been under active development 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 PowerNode6000/9000 and NP1; NeXT
      workstations; IBM RS/6000; HPPA 9000/700 running HPUX;
      Ardent/Stardent; Encore Multi-Max; and much more.
    </para>

    <para>
      BRL-CAD is a collection of more than 400 tools, utilities, and
      applications comprising more than a million lines of source
      code.  The 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,
      Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, and Windows among others.  BRL-CAD is
      distributed in binary and source code form as free open source
      software (FOSS), provided under Open Source Initiative (OSI)
      approved license terms.
    </para>

    <note>
      <para>
        Mike Muuss began the initial architecture and design of
        BRL-CAD back 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 21 December 2004.
      </para>
    </note>

  </section>

</article>
