Golden Software LLC is a

privately held A privately held company (or simply a private company) is a company whose shares and related rights or obligations are not offered for public subscription or publicly negotiated in the respective listed markets, but rather the company's stock is ...

, American company based in

Golden, Colorado Golden is a List of municipalities in Colorado#Home rule municipality, home rule city that is the county seat of Jefferson County, Colorado, Jefferson County, Colorado, United States. The city population was 20,399 at the 2020 United States Censu ...

. It develops and markets a small catalog of

GIS A geographic information system (GIS) is a type of database containing Geographic data and information, geographic data (that is, descriptions of phenomena for which location is relevant), combined with Geographic information system software, sof ...

and

scientific software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

. Founded in 1983, Golden Software was the first to market three-dimensional surface and contour mapping applications for the PC.

History

Patrick Madison, a CSM computer science instructor, and Dan Smith, a graduate student, began a partnership in 1983 with the development of a printer interface language that took advantage of the full resolution available to dot-matrix printers. Their first commercial program, PlotCall, transformed

plotter A plotter is a machine that produces vector graphics drawings. Plotters draw lines on paper using a pen, or in some applications, use a knife to cut a material like vinyl or leather. In the latter case, they are sometimes known as a cutting pl ...

instructions into dot-matrix instructions compatible with over 20 commercial printers. This opened the computer graphing and mapping market to the wider arena of users with inexpensive commercial printers. Between 1985 and 1986 the company released two

DOS DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems. DOS may also refer to: Computing * Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel * Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicatio ...

applications: Surfer, a

surface A surface, as the term is most generally used, is the outermost or uppermost layer of a physical object or space. It is the portion or region of the object that can first be perceived by an observer using the senses of sight and touch, and is t ...

and

contour Contour may refer to: * Contour (linguistics), a phonetic sound * Pitch contour * Contour (camera system), a 3D digital camera system * Contour, the KDE Plasma 4 interface for tablet devices * Contour line, a curve along which the function has a ...

mapping program, and Grapher, a spreadsheet-plotting application. In 1990 it released its first

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

program: MapViewer. Their next product, Didger was released in 1996. Strater, a subsurface log and cross section plotting application, and Voxler, a 3D well and volumetric data visualization application, began shipping in 2004 and 2006 respectively. In October 2014, General Manager Blakelee Mills became CEO of Golden Software. Patrick Madison remained the company's President, and Dan Smith remained the lead developer. Golden Software released its newest product, Raster Tools in April 2016. Raster Tools is an add-in for

Esri Esri (; Environmental Systems Research Institute) is an American multinational geographic information system (GIS) software company. It is best known for its ArcGIS products. With a 43% market share, Esri is the world's leading supplier of GIS ...

ArcMap ArcMap is the main component of Esri's ArcGIS suite of geospatial processing programs, and is used primarily to view, edit, create, and analyze geospatial data. ArcMap allows the user to explore data within a data set, symbolize features accordin ...

that creates raster data sets from XYZ data.

References

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External links

* {{Official website Software companies based in Colorado Privately held companies based in Colorado Companies based in Colorado Software companies of the United States