
IDL 5.0 was probably 9 months late. At release, Support handed out Beer with a special label – “Peace Dave”.

The IDL HandiGuide™ – created by the brilliant documentation leader – Keith C. I’d say released with v4.0

A one-of-a-kind key ring – a local vendor made an example of items for RSI. I somehow ended up with the sample keyring!

The first appearance of IDL Widgets came via this Addendum. Oh, and you hand to start IDL with the WIDL command on VMS.

Old graphics (Direct Graphics – which we called level 1 internally). I used this to write the initial ION implementation at home (used a graphics driver to pump commands down a socket to the client Java Applet!).

Mid 90s’ IDL marketing – Purple was big back then (remember this was the time of Barney the Dinosaur)

Famous “Powered by IDL” sticker. I still have at least 50 of these things. Note the domain name change from rsinc.com to ResearchSystems.com — a new Marketing director was hired and I think this was the big thing she did.

Mid/late 90s company slogan – after “Software for Science”. There was a big internal contest for the new slogan – this was proposed by Dave S and won! (I remember people felt it was rigged at the time — but it wasn’t).