
<section>
    <title>
        Brief History of NMPlot
    </title>
    <para>
        The original development of NMPlot was sponsored by the United
        States Air Force (USAF) and the United States Federal Aviation
        Administration (US FAA). It was developed to produce contour plots
        for their airport noise models.
    </para>
    <para>
        Version 1.0, released in May 1989, was a Microsoft MS-DOS
        application. It was written in Borland Pascal, and had limited
        capabilities. Numerous successive versions have steadily increased
        its power and features.
    </para>
    <para>
        In January 1997, work began on a Microsoft Windows version
        of NMPlot. As part of this project, the entire application was
        ported to C++, numerous sections were rewritten from scratch,
        and the user interface was modified to conform to Microsoft Windows
        conventions. The first Microsoft Windows version of NMPlot was
        released in February, 1998.
    </para>
    <para>
        While NMPlot was originally designed to support noise models,
        it is neutral to any particular application domain. It can just
        as easily process data from other types of models (for example,
        air pollution models) or from sources other than computer models
        (for example, measured data).
    </para>
    <para>
        NMPlot is currently shipped as the standard graphical analysis
        tool of the following applications.
    </para>
    [-include "NMPlot_ApplicationsUsingNMPlot_List.rxl"-]
</section>
