Golden Software
 | |
| Private company | |
| Industry | Scientific Software |
| Founded | 1983 |
| Headquarters | 809 14th Street, Golden, Colorado, USA 80401 |
Key people |
Patrick Madison, (President) Dan Smith, (Lead Developer) |
| Website |
www |
Golden Software LLC is a privately held, American company based in Golden, Colorado. It develops and markets a small catalog of GIS and scientific software.
Founded in 1983, Golden Software is one of the world's oldest software companies, and the first to market three-dimensional surface and contour mapping applications for the PC.[1]
History
Patrick Madison, a CSM computer science instructor, and Dan Smith, a graduate student, began a partnership in 1983 with the development of a printer interface language that took advantage of the full resolution available to dot-matrix printers.
Their first commercial program, PlotCall, transformed plotter instructions into dot-matrix instructions compatible with over 20 commercial printers.[2] This opened the computer graphing and mapping market to the wider arena of users with inexpensive commercial printers.
Between 1985 and 1986 the company released two DOS applications: Surfer, a surface and contour mapping program, and Grapher, a spreadsheet-plotting application.
In 1990 it released its first Windows program: MapViewer. Their next product, Didger was released in 1996.
Strater, a subsurface log and cross section plotting application, and Voxler, a 3D well and volumetric data visualization application, began shipping in 2004 and 2006 respectively.
In October 2014, General Manager Blakelee Mills became CEO of Golden Software. Patrick Madison remained the company's President, and Dan Smith remained the lead developer.
Golden Software released its newest product, Raster Tools in April 2016. Raster Tools is an add-in for Esri's ArcMap that creates raster data sets from XYZ data.
Products
Golden Software programs are used in a wide variety of professional geological applications. They have been described as "user-friendly and accessible".[3]
- PlotCall a DOS graphics-printing program
- Surfer, a surface- and contour-mapping program[4]
- Grapher, a plotting application
- MapViewer, a georeferencing cartography program
- Didger, a georeferencing, map and log digitizing, and coordinate-conversion package
- Strater, a well and borehole logging application
- Voxler, a 3D volumetric modeling and analysis program
- Raster Tools, a raster creation add-in for ArcMap.
References
- ↑ Graham, Steve (February 15, 2007). "Mapping a global business model". Mile High News. p. 23.
- ↑ "PC: the independent guide to IBM personal computers". PC: the Independent Guide to IBM Personal Computers. San Francisco, Calif.: Software Communications, c1982. 3: 170, 381. March 1984. ISSN 0745-2500.
- ↑ Amantov, Aleksey. "Golden Software Products: from Ordinary Geological Tasks to Experimental Maps". Retrieved 2008-10-24.
- ↑ Hincapie, Jaime Omar (2008). Shallow Geophysical Techniques Applied to Archaeology, Economic Geology, and Groundwater Resources. ProQuest. p. 40. ISBN 9780549587835. Retrieved 2013-06-18.
Golden Software Surfer Surfer® is a data contouring program that produces 2D plots from 3D scattered data. It can implement a variety of data gridding and filtering algorithms, and it can display contour maps, colored maps, shaded relief maps and 3D surfaces.
- "Golden Software History". Retrieved 2014-08-04.
- Grant, Felix. "Visualisation: Golden Software". Software Reviews. Scientific Computing World. Retrieved 2008-10-24.