The Map Overlay and Statistical System (MOSS) is the earliest known Open Source Geographic Information System. The first version of MOSS was developed by Carl Reed in the late 1970's as part of a US Fish and Wildlife Service habitat mitigation project. The first version of MOSS was programmed in FORTRAN on a CDC mainframe and then ported to a Data General minicomputer in 1979 and 1980. The first US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) installation of MOSS occurred in 1980 at the BLM Oregon State Office. PC-MOSS is the Windows version of MOSS that was developed & released by Solomon 'Sol' Katz, through the BLM. This repository contains the PC-MOSS files, including the FORTRAN language source code.
~1987
In mid-2020 a surviving copy of the MOSS codebase was discovered at the University of Latvia, and was temporarily preserved at the German Institute of Economic Research (DIW Berlin).
Sol unfortunately passed away in 1999 from Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma, but his legacy lives on in the FOSS4G world. Those interested in making a donation, as per Sol's family's request, can do so at https://donate.cancer.org.
The annual Sol Katz Award (https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Sol_Katz_Award), which began in 2005, acknowledges the work of FOSS4G community members, and pays tribute to one of its founders, for years to come.
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