This period was characterised by moves to bring some kind of order to the proliferating options for graphics software and to arrive at a set of options which met users' needs across a wide range of evolving hardware and operating systems while also being sustainable within the resources available.
It was decided early on to concentrate on a single basic-level package, GKS 7.2, across all supported machines rather than the three that had been supported before. Support would continue for the high-level packages that had been in use, with the addition of the NAG Graphics Supplement, and by 1989 it had been decided that the CGM format for the storage and transfer of graphics information would be used wherever possible as would the UNIRAS set of packages for presentation graphics. In the early 1990s AVS (Advanced Visualization System) became widely used in the UK academic community for data visualisation and was made available on a range of SERC-supported computer systems and on the Atlas Video Facility.
The comings and goings of the various software systems and the nature of the support provided may be tracked via the newsletter articles accessible via the Literature icon.
