pcb-rnd user manual

## 1.2. pcb-rnd History

pcb-rnd is a rapid moving independent project started in 2013, but roots tracing back to the early 90s, to PCB.

From the pcb.html documentation:

    	Pcb was first written by Thomas Nau for an
    	Atari ST in 1990 and ported to UNIX and X11 in
    	1994.  It was not intended as a professional layout system, but as a tool
    	which supports people who do some home-developing of hardware.

In Fall 2013, Tibor 'Igor2' Palinkas started an unofficial fork of PCB to make and share random changes and improvements (hence the name "-rnd"). Over the following years the fork was officially announced, adopted additional users, and reached various milestones, including modularization of the code base, a better configuration system.

In 2015, the project switched pace: lot of hours invested and many new developers and contributors joined, pcb-rnd started to grow rapidly. Most of the code base has been extended, cleaned up or rewritten.

In 2016 and 2017 pcb-rnd went on growig in number of developers, contributors and users. The number of long standing bugs and misfeatures fixed and missing features implemented grew a lot too. This affected major components as the plugin system, the I/O (file format support) subsystem and even the data model pcb-rnd operates on.

Between 2017 and 2019 pcb-rnd got a major data model redesign. The resulting data model is generic and flexible, capable of representing most details imported from alien file formats.

pcb-rnd is part of the ringdove EDA suite.

A more complete history can be found in the pcb-history project.