History

This article is stub. more information should be added shortly.

The beginning (1987)

Start of two small projects due to A. Giovini and G. Niesi ([1]). In late 1987, the prototype of a small system capable of handling multivarite polynomial rings was developed for Macintosh environments ([2]).

CoCoA (1988-1992)

L. Robbiano coordinates the integration of the two projects into a single project: CoCoA. The first release of CoCoA was developed by A. Giovini and G. Niesi, and was written in Pascal language. The system in its first distributed version (0.99) was presented at the COCOA II Meeting (Genova, May 29-June 3, 1989) and at the Computers & Mathematics 1989 conference (MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, June 13-17, 1989) within the tutorial minicourse 'Gröbner bases: A Foundation for Commutative Algebra' given by L. Robbiano. The original plan was not to turn CoCoA into a "software product" ([3]). Apparently, this plan changed over time... Initially the system was running only on Macintosh. Then it was ported to PCs by E. Armando who did some work on a second release of the system ([4]). The second version (1.0) and the third version (1.5) were published in 1990 and 1991, respectively ([5]). In 1990, about 150 copies of CoCoA were distributed ([6]). First publications using CoCoA were published around 1992 ([7]), some even using experimental versions of CoCoA, such as CoCoA 1.5.3 ([8]).

CoCoA 3 (1993-1995)

After the premature death of Giovini in January 1993 a new project was started in February 1993 ([9]). L. Robbiano continues to act as the project manager, A. Capani joins G. Niesi as authors and in the design and implementation of a new project written in C: CoCoA 3. Many other researchers like J. Abbott, A. Bigatti, M. Caboara, and G. De Dominics contribute with pieces of code ([10]).

COCOA IV (June 1995)

And again, another COCOA-conference, this time COCOA IV (May 29-June 2, 1995), this time at Dipartimento di Matematica, Universita' di Genova, Genova, Italy.

The first beta of CoCoA 3, CoCoA 3.0b, was published there, too ([11]).

[ToDo: any nice little story about the conference?]

CoCoA 3.02b (1996)

With CoCoA 3.02b, the second beta version of CoCoA 3 was published on Lancelot.

COCOA V (June 1997)

The fifth COCOA-Conference COCOA V was located at Herstmonceux Castle at June 3-6, 1997.

CoCoA 3.3 (1997)

CoCoA 3.3 was published

CoCoA 3.4 (March 1998)

CoCoA 3.4 was pubished and:

Started mirroring of CoCoA at Reed College, Portland, Oregon (US).

It was (PROBABLY!) also around this time that this photo with these people, in the order listed there, on it was taken.

CoCoA 3.5 (July 1998)

CoCoA 3.5

CoCoA 3.6 (December 1998)

CoCoA 3.6

COCOA VI Meeting (May 1999)

From May 31st to June 5th the sixth COCOA meeting was situaded at Villa Gualino, Torino, Italy.

[ToDo: anything else to add here?]

CoCoA 3.7 (June 1999)

CoCoA 3.7

CoCoA 4 (July 2000)

CoCoA 3 settles down and becomes CoCoA 4

COCOA VIII (June 2003)

COmputational COmmutative Algebra and International School on Computer Algebra was held at Universidad de Cádiz in Spain on 2-7 June, 2003.

The CoCoA VIII was organized by Francisco Castro, Tony Geramita, Tomas Recio and Lorenzo Robbiano.

Tutorials during the school were given by Gregor Kemper and Martin Kreuzer. The minicourse was given by Jose María Ucha.

CoCoALib 0.0 (June 2003)

C++ library open to alpha testers

CoCoa 4.3 (December 2003)

This version of CoCoA is largely a consolidation of version 4.2. A number of bugs and inconsistencies have been corrected, with improvements to efficiency in certain cases. This new release should be more robust, and more helpful when an error occurs.

CoCoA Discussion Board (September 2004)

The CoCoA Discussion Board was set up at the University of Dortmund. It started at the 29th September, based on an idea, created during a visit of the Italian developer team in Dortmund in September 2004.

CoCoA 4.4 Pre-release 1 (January 2005)

The first pre-release of CoCoA was published.

CoCoA 4.4 (May 2005)

The first game was implemented in CoCoA: Cant Stop The rules can be found at www.boardgamegeek.com (of course some other new features are present, too)...

CoCoA Summer School (May 2005)

The fourth CoCoA Summer School was held this year in Porto Conte, Italy.

The tutorials were given by Juan Migliore and Serkan Hosten. The minicourse was given by John Abbott.

This time, the school was not linked to a CoCoA Conference, because the MEGA05 was in this year, too. So the school was linked to this conference instead.

CoCoa Wiki (June 2005)

In June 2005 this wiki was set up in Dortmund. Let us hope, that it works out...

ToDo

• add information about cocoa conferences and schools
• add information about developers of single versions
• add links
• write complete text