[sane-devel] History of SANE

[David Mosberger-Tang]

>>>>> On Tue, 20 Nov 2001 22:34:50 +0100, Henning Meier-Geinitz <henning@meier-geinitz.de> said:

  Henning> Hi, I just found out that it's about 5 years now that SANE
  Henning> came into existance. Quite a long time at least concerning
  Henning> software in my opinion.

My oh my, how time flies!

  Henning> Time to celebrate a birthday party?

Sounds great to me! ;-)

  Henning> The first mail on sane-devel is from 1996-12-09.

  Henning> Maybe someone (David?) can provide more data: Is there an
  Henning> older sane package than 0.1?

No, I don't think so.  Before SANE, there was a mscan-0.[012], which
was a Mustek specific scanner program.  Then I thought it was silly to
have each and every scanner model supported by a separate program,
duplicating all the user interface code over and over again.  At some
point, Andy Beck and I got together and started fleshing out.

  Henning> Is there a standard 0.1?

I'm quite sure there must have been one, but it's probably gone
forever.  Actually, I'm not sure anymore whether it was Andy or me who
started sane.tex.  One thing I remember quite vividly is that I wrote
the section describing the SANE network protocol on a plane ride to my
next job interview.  I was in the middle of finishing my dissertation,
interviewing with various companies, so squeezing this in was quite
crazy, but it was also fun, in a way. ;-)

  Henning> When was the idea of SANE born?

Don't know about Andy, but I remember contemplating it early on while
working on mscan.  I just thought it was crazy that I'd have to write
my own user interface when there are so many other good scanner
programs out there already and all I really wanted was just to have my
scanner supported.

Given that mscan-0.0 was out around Sep 1996, that's probably close to
the birth of the ideas behind SANE.  We looked at various existing
interfaces (including TWAIN, the linux hand scanner interface, etc.)
and didn't really like what we were seeing, so we though perhaps it's
time to start something new.

  Henning> Some statistics: :-)

Very impressive stats!  I have to say I'm very happy to see how the
SANE community has grown.  I think you and Oliver in particular are
doing a great job at keeping things moving forward.  This is how Open
Source is meant to work.  Kudos to all of you!

	--david