It was 20 years ago, in early July 1994, that I started work on AFNI. An outline of the story can be found in this paper.

One reason the AFNI viewer is so different from what's available in FSL and SPM is that from the very beginning my goal was to let the user surf through data in 5 "dimensions" = xyz + imaging run + subject -- time was added in 1996, when computers had more memory -- the first computers AFNI ran on (SGI and HP) had 32 MB of RAM, which was a lot for 1994. Statistical analyses came somewhat later in 1994 -- I think the first version of 3dttest was in November 1994.

The first version of AFNI that was useful was ready in September 1994, and the first users were Julie Frost and Julie Bobholz. I know that Julie Frost still uses AFNI, so she can plausibly claim to be AFNI user #1 (I of course am user #0). I released AFNI for download to the masses on 15 Feb 1995. From the beginning, AFNI worked on Linux, since I had a Linux version 0.99 system at home (with 4 bit graphics -- woo hoo!).

I work on AFNI at home a lot, and in those days I could transfer the source code archive back and forth on a single floppy disk (modems being too slow and unreliable). Now afni_src.tgz is 23 MB of code, so the package has grown up some.

A few components of AFNI actually date to code I wrote in the mid-1980s -- the 'calc' expression parser/evaluator and the 1dplot-style graphs were written (in Fortran) for much earlier data processing needs.

I thank everyone on this message board, and many beyond it, for their support and "quick" questions. AFNI has greatly surpassed my limited expectations and plans from 20 years ago -- I really didn't know what I was starting then.

-- Bob Cox