#Imagej software for mac mac

Rasband wanted to create a system that was smaller and more affordable than the software systems that required the $150,000 PDP-11 minicomputers in use at the time. It was his goal to have a low cost image analysis system that the average bench scientist could afford and deploy. Rasband decided to write that software in support of the imaging analysis needs he saw at the time, chiefly, better access in terms both of ease of adoption and cost. Rasband realized that it had the appropriate hardware and low level software to be an ideal base for a small, low-cost image analysis system all it needed was some software for image analysis.

#Imagej software for mac mac

There was no image analysis program for the Macintosh computer, and Rasband had just obtained one of the first Mac IIs. Rasband applied for this position, was hired and worked at the NIH until he retired in 2010.ДЄt the time Rasband began working at the Research Services Branch at the National Institute of Mental Health, part of the intramural campus of the NIH, most scientific data processing was done on mainframe computers and the personal computer revolution was just beginning. One day in 1970 in the commons at the University of Maryland he saw a notice for a part time programming position at NIH in Bethesda working on the LINC (Laboratory INstrument Computer) created at MIT. While there Rasband became aware of a University of Maryland graduate program that would allow him to pursue his Masters in computer science and thus leave the service early. Shortly after, Rasband was drafted by the army and assigned to the Pentagon. While there Rasband was involved in COBOL programming and general systems programming. He was involved early on with the IBM computer punch card systems while still in school and leveraged this expertise to get a job with the State of New MexicoвЂ™s Department of Automated Processing.

Rasband received his bachelorвЂ™s in math from the University of New Mexico in 1965. NIH Image, the predecessor to ImageJ, was created by Wayne Rasband at NIH in 1987, but the early foundation for this program started even earlier at the beginning of RasbandвЂ™s career. To best understand this, one needs to look at how ImageJ started. In this current age of careful oversight and scrutiny from administrative bodies, the story of ImageJ and the independent track that Rasband had in its development is both interesting and telling for other projects. ImageJ became what it is through years of collaborative effort and NIH best nurtured it by providing the resources to support the primary programmer, Wayne Rasband, throughout this period. Despite its original name, NIH image, and its home at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for over 30 years in some form, ImageJ is a product of need and user driven development and collaboration rather than a specific plan by the NIH to create it at the onset. Given the great success and impact of ImageJ one would expect that this application was a software initiative with official backing and formal planning by a central funding body. Interestingly, the program has done so not by continuously reinventing itself but instead by sticking to a core set of design principles that have allowed it to become a modern image processing platform and yet retain an interface that a user from over 20 years ago would recognize and readily use. Yet 25 years later the program not only persists but continues to push and drive the field. The scientific image analysis program, ImageJ 1, 2, known in previous incarnations as NIH Image 3, is an early pioneer in image analysis. Yet in this great diversity and change, one software tool has not only survived but thrived.

This is due in part to the relative youth of the field, the wide variety of imaging software tools available, sheer diversity of sub fields and specialized tools, and the constant creation and evolution of new tools. While the role of the optical technologies and methods have been well documented, the role of scientific imaging software and its origins have been seldom discussed in any historical context. The modern computer coupled to advances in microscopy technology is enabling new frontiers in biology to be visualized. One of the fields where scientific computing has made particular inroads has been in the area of biological imaging. The last fifty years have seen tremendous technological advances, few greater than in the area of scientific computing.