File: THANKS

GNU C-Graph Version 2.0
October 2011
 
Copyright (c) 2008, 2009, 2011 Adrienne Gaye Thompson

This file is part of GNU C-Graph.

Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification,
is permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright
notice and this notice are preserved.

~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~

I conceived the ideas underpinning GNU C-Graph during the first few
weeks of October 1982, the Honours year of my BSc Engineering program
at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. C-Graph is the resurrected
Fortran 77 code of which my Honours dissertation "Interactive Computer
Program: Demonstrating Sampling Convolution and the FFT" (the Thesis,
the Fortran Program) is constituted.

Thanks to:

* The dedicatee, my fiance and best friend attorney-at-law Eliezer
  Regnier: for resources necessary for the production of GNU C-Graph;
  for teaching me how to find strength in the face of adversity; for
  inspiration transcendent; and for the distinct privilege of knowing
  him.

* My parents, Violet and Manley Thompson, who instilled the
  inextinguishable drive to succeed that propelled me throughout the
  struggle in which C-Graph found its genesis.

* MIT Professor Eric Grimson, for believing in me from the outset and
  for unreservedly advocating my authorship of the Thesis - throughout.

* Hacker extraordinaire Dr^11 Richard Stallman: for expressing
  confidence that I had the hacker chops for authoring a professional
  software package; for conceiving and advancing the revolutionary
  freedom that provides source code from which we can all learn; for
  fathering the Free Software Movement that has indelibly altered the
  dimensions of computer culture; and for everything GNU.

* University of Aberdeen Mathematics Professor, Graham Hall for being
  insightful enough to recognize in September 1982 that the Department
  of Engineering were likely to deny me guidance in the fulfillment of
  the thesis requirement. Graham - of his own accord - along with
  fellow mathematics lecturer Dr. Iain Craw referred me to Jim
  Mitchell of the University's Computer Centre to set the project in
  motion. Jim wrote a few lines of code illustrating how Fortran 77's
  character data type could be used to implement interactive features
  by passing data read from the keyboard to a subroutine. Special
  thanks to Jim for the positive and motivating feedback he gave me,
  when my "supervisors" Lees and Stronach pronounced the Fortran
  Program to be "rubbish".

* University of Aberdeen engineering Ph.D candidates Brian Baines and
  Michael Grieves, who quickly brought me up to speed with the
  Honeywell mainframe with their Priceless computer room banter and,
  by so doing, witnessed my creation of the Fortran Program. Their
  unfailing support was enthusiastic; Baines, for example, having
  introduced me to the departmental plotter just days before I needed
  to print graphs generated by the Fortran program "Maglev" in my
  design project.

* Neil Fairweather (also a PhD candidate at Aberdeen) who in addition
  to lendng me his mathematics notes, counselled me on how to time
  production of My Thesis, underscoring that it takes just as long to
  write the Thesis as to do the actual work.

* Professor Hamish Keir, for allowing me to use his Biochemistry class
  library when I needed to escape the debilitating racist environment
  of the Department of Engineering. In the conducive atmosphere of
  Keir's class library, I conceived many of the ideas for my
  Dissertation, and this was where I designed and manually debugged
  much of the Fortran Program itself. Thanks to Hamish for simply
  telling me to stop programming (and later, to halt the writing of
  the Thesis) when he realised that my supervisors intended to burden
  me with the Thesis at the expense of my written examinations - Lees
  having announced that I would "not produce an Honours project".

* Departmental secretary Louise Coull: for typing the text of the
  Thesis (there were no suitable word processing facilities for
  students), and for defying Engineering faculty who unreasonably
  increased her workload so as to encumber her.

* Martin Stephenson, artist and engineering Reprographics Unit
  technician, University of Aberdeen: for drawing three diagrams for
  my Thesis in return, he said, for the time I had spent sitting for
  one of his paintings; for insisting that I "take this as far as you
  can"; and for reminding me to revisit my artistic side by exclaiming
  (when he saw the text of the Thesis) that all the time he had been
  working on his painting of me he had not realised that I was "an
  artist too".

* Dennis Bein, also of the Reprographics Unit, who emphasised that he
  had, himself, witnessed how much time I had spent all year working
  on my Thesis, and along with Martin tried, in vain, to draw my
  attention to the fact of the stolen Thesis. 

* Scottish engineering classmates, William Maine and Colin Steele, who
  warned me by letter in late 1983, pointing out that there was
  something seriously wrong with the II-2 degree class awarded, urging
  me to "sort it out"; and my mathematics contemporary Julie who, in
  our third year, initiated my adventures into the craft of nested DO
  loops.
  
* Marie Hill, for revealing in In July 1996 that "they are saying that
  you don't have this ability" - the ability to write computer
  programs. Alarmed, I set out to teach myself C to prove that this
  was a lie.

* Gareth Webb: for introducing me to GNU/Linux, for backing up my
  hard-drive, and for lending me books on Unix and the C programming
  language.

* Garfield Knight, for loaning me the book on C programming that
  equipped me to write C-Graph 1.0.

* Joanne Cooper-Johnson for first suggesting (in 1996) that I should
  re-write the Program in my Thesis, and Peter Johnson for (more
  recently) introducing me to Inkscape.

* University of the West Indies (UWI) faculty and staff: Kristin Fox
  and Professor Chukwudum Uche for the use of computer lab facilities
  in exchange for assisting students; Audrey Chambers, Norma Davis,
  Beverly Lothian, and Ronald Johnson, for resources in ISER (Sir
  Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Research), and for
  encouraging me to persevere with the matter of authorship.

* Patrick Murray, former Petroleum Corporation of Jamaica (PCJ)
  consultant: for proposing that I pursue my interests in intelligent
  control systems research and development both in the workplace and
  in graduate study; and for disclosing that the directors of PCJ had
  been informed (apparently by the University of Aberdeen) that I had
  no degree. 

* UWI Deputy Principal Professor Elsa Leo-Rhynie, for disclosing in
  October 1996 that my Thesis had been "completely deleted" from my
  academic record. This information was singular in identifying the
  magnitude of the University's fraud - the award of an Honours degree
  in absence of the mandatory thesis requirement, in order to conceal
  the theft of property constituting rights in the Thesis.

* The members of the newsgroup comp.lang.fortran who (apparently
  amused) replied to my queries in the thread "Fortran Lesson: Are
  these equivalent?" <http://tinyurl.com/3mfat3g>: Duane Bozarth, Ian
  Bush, Richard Maine, Clive Page, and Craig Powers. Thanks for
  introducing me to modern Fortran and for effectively dissuading my
  misconceived plans for using Fortran 77 to code C-Graph.

* ImageMagick's Fred Weinhaus and Anthony Thyssen who, through their
  Users forum, introduced me to IM's "duplicate" operator when I was
  trying to get IM's "loop" to behave like nested "DO" loops in
  Fortran while animating C-Graph's splash screen image. Joseph
  Manley, for helping to check on the memory consumption and load time
  of the splash screen's animated gif.

* Infochannel's three musketeers Andre Dennis, Gregory McCreath, and
  Roget Williams: for contributing one of their computer system units
  after my mother board had crashed, and for relocating my harddrive
  free of charge. I coded GNU C-Graph version 2.0 on this
  machine. Highest regards for Infochannel <http://infochan.com>, the
  Caribbean's first commercial Internet Service Provider, for
  providing a reliable, flexible, affordable, and highly customizable
  service.

* Ethel Webber, and Noeleen Porter, for making their computer monitors
  available when mine refused to function.

* Annissa Thompson, for ordering printing supplies so I could
  scrutinise manuals and capture the evolution of C-Graph.

* Arthur Wouk, for putting his simple FFT in the public domain; Alan
  J.Miller, for converting Wouk's f77 code to f90; Jason Blevins, for
  hosting a mirror of Alan's entire software repository at
  <http://www.jblevins.org/mirror/amiller/>.

* Andy Vaught, for his innovation in introducing a modern Fortran
  compiler to the Free Software Community. For being bold enough to
  continue development of G95 solo, and in so doing provided me with
  the only easily installable, free, robust compiler for my old Red
  Hat 8.0 box enabling me to get C-Graph off to a flying start.

* Gifted artist Donato Giancola, for encouraging me to paint;
  photographer Conrad Nicely, and saxophonist Warren Harris, for
  reference photographs - as it was through Regnier's portrait that
  C-Graph found it's muse.

* GNU anchor Karl Berry: for advising me to install up to date
  Autotools on my old Red Hat 8.0 box; for pointing me to GNU Hello,
  which demonstrates how to build packages conforming to the GNU
  Coding Standards; for suggesting that the command-line options
  "help" and "version" could simply be implemented using Fortran
  intrinsics for handling command line arguments; for punctuating the
  often frustrating journey with distractions on brownie and
  cheesecakes recipes; and for not laughing out loud when I discovered
  the existence of GDB.

* Cruiser Thompson - my spunky, impish, adorable Shih-Tzu-Corgi-Poodle
  - for his ever faithful companionship at the computer.

* Others who contributed indirectly to my identification of the theft
  of my Thesis and the development of C-Graph are also included
  below. This is by no means an exhaustive list.


This is everyone in alphabetical order:

Barrow, Justin
Barrow, Zona
Bein, Dennis
Baines, Brian
Bennet, Enid
Bernard, Diane
Berry, Karl
Blevins, Jason
Bozarth, Duane
Brown, Denniston
Bush, Ian
Chambers, Audrey
Clark, Ruth
Coull Louise
Cooper-Johnson, Joanne
Craw, Iain
Davis, Norma
Dennis, Andre
Dennison, Kenneth
Duncan, Jean
Ennever-Robotham, Fay
Fairweather, Neil
Foster, Donald
Fox, Kristin
German, Gerry
Giancola, Donato
Gibbs, Damien
Alex, Gioulekas,
Grieves, Michael
Grimson, Eric
Hall, Graham
Hamilton, Osmond
Hamilton, Noblyn
Harris, Warren
Hill, Marie
Holness, Philippia
Hutchinson, Cornelius
Hutchinson, Joyce
Imperial Optical Jamaica Ltd.
Johnson, Pamela
Johnson, Peter
Johnson, Ronald
Jones, Reginald Victor
Julie
Keir, Hamish
Knight, Garfield
Lawrence, Isaac
Leo-Rhynie, Elsa
Lewis, Michael
Lothian, Beverly
Maine, Richard
Maine, William
Manley, Joseph
McCreath, Gregory
Mclaughlin, Laurie
Mitchell, Jim
Miller, Alan
Morgan, Anya
Murray, Patrick
Nicely, Conrad
Page, Clive
Panton, Bernard
Porter, Auckland
Porter, Brenda
Porter, Hendricks
Porter, Kenneth
Porter, Manzie
Porter, Mark
Porter, Mavis
Porter, Noeleen
Porter, Noreen
Porter, Robert
Powers, Craig
Ramsay, Karl
Regnier, Eliezer
Ricketts, Marilyn
Rigall, Eileen
Roberts, Sharon
Smith, Adrian
Smith, Andrew
Stallman, Richard
Steele, Colin
Stephenson, Martin
Stewart, Pablo
Thompson, Annissa
Thompson, Charis
Thompson, Cruiser
Thompson, Fergus
Thompson, Florette
Thompson, Manley
Thompson, Uda (Cynthia)
Thompson, Violet
Thyssen, Anthony
Toyloy, Arlene
Uche, Chukwudum
Vaught, Andy
Webb, Gareth
Webber, Ethel
Weinhaus, Fred
Whitbourne, Fay
Whitehead, Jill
Williams, Nadia
Williams, Roget
Wouk, Arthur
Zeeman, Mary-Lou



Adrienne Gaye Thompson
October 2011





