Many dozens of people have contributed to the ongoing development of CFITSIO beginning in 1996. The following list only includes some of the especially significant contributions, mainly from the first few years of development. Sincere appologies to the many other people not listed who have suggested enhancements, reported bugs, and especially, who have contributed actual code that has been incorporated into CFITSIO.

• Programmers from the Integral Science Data Center, Switzerland (Jurek Borkowski, Bruce O'Neel, and Don Jennings) designed the concept of plug-in I/O drivers for CFITSIO 2.0. This greatly simplified the low-level I/O which in turn made other new features such as support for compressed FITS files and IRAF image files much easier to implement.

• Jurek Borkowski wrote the shared memory file driver and Bruce O'Neel wrote the FTP, HTTP and ROOT file drivers.

• Jurek Borkowski wrote the template file parsing routines.

• Don Jennings wrote the hierarchical grouping routines.

• Giuliano Taffoni and Andrea Barisani, at INAF, University of Trieste, Italy, implemented the I/O driver routines for accessing FITS files on the computational grids using the gridftp protocol.

• Uwe Lammers (XMM/ESA/ESTEC) provided the fast lexical parsing algorithm that is used by CFITSIO to filter table rows at run time. This algorithm in effect compiles the expression, so that it does not need to be interpreted for every row of the table.

• Peter Wilson (RSTX, NASA/GSFC) coded the parsing algorithm provided by Lammers in C and combined it with the CFITSIO iterator function for even faster throughput. He also enhanced it to support all the FITS datatypes as well as null values.

• The CFITSIO Iterator function is loosely based on a similar idea developed by the XMM project.

• Peter Wilson wrote the complete set of wrapper routines which provide a simple and portable interface for Fortran programs to call CFITSIO.

• The file filtering and binning syntax used by CFITSIO is modelled on a similar syntax developed by Jonathan McDowell and collaborators at the Chandra Science Center.

• The new compressed image data format (where the image is tiled and the compressed byte stream from each tile is stored in a binary table) was implemented in collaboration with Richard White (STScI), Perry Greenfield (STScI) and Doug Tody (NOAO).

• Doug Mink (SAO) provided the routines for converting IRAF format images into FITS format.

Return to the FITSIO home page.