A Brief History of APRS

This is a brief history of the development of APRS.

1992-November (ARRL DCC)

Bob Bruniga (WB4APR) shows APRS at the ARRL Digital Communications Conference (DCC) held in New Jersey. Mark and Keith Sproul were in attendance. APRS (the DOS version) is written in QuickBasic.

The first beta version of MacAPRS was released. Note, MacAPRS is written entirely in C. None of Bob Bruniga's code was used in the Mac version and the Mac developers never even saw any of Bob's original code.

Version 1.0 of MacAPRS was released.

At this time, several critical items came together. CodeWarrior, the development system that the Sproul brothers used for MacAPRS came out with support for developing Windows programs on the Macintosh. Mark Sproul, who is porting MacAPRS to Windows finally succumbed to the pressure from APRS users. When these things happened, Mark and Keith determined that it was realistic to port the already developed Macintosh code to Windows and made the annoucement that WinAPRS was under way. Refer to the press release for more info.

WinAPRS is working. Note, that less than one month later, WinAPRS is able to display maps. Mark had NEVER programmed Windows before.

The first beta version (V0.1.0) of WinAPRS released to a select number of users.

WinAPRS beta Version 0.2.0 released to the general public.

WinAPRS version 1.0.0 was released at the 1996 Dayton Hamfest. A CD-ROM full of maps was also made available at this time. One important note, the Map file format is the SAME for MacAPRS and WinAPRS. It is NOT the same as the DOS version of APRS but both of them can read DOS-APRS maps. This CD-ROM will contain hundreds of hi-resolution MacAPRS/WinAPRS maps and will also contain all of the DOS-APRS maps that are available.

At the Dayton Hamfest, we also showed a very preliminary version of X-APRS, APRS for X-Windows. We are NOT making any promisies at this time but we hope to have it available but Dayton 1997.

WinAPRS version 1.1.0 released
MacAPRS version 2.6.0 released

WinAPRS version 1.1.7 released
MacAPRS version 2.6.7 released
dosAPRS version 7.7 released