Pure Data

PD (aka Pure Data) is a real-time graphical programming environment for audio, video, and graphical processing. Pd is free software and can be downloaded either as an OS-specific package, source package, or directly from CVS. Pd was written to be multi-platform and therefore is quite portable; versions exist for Win32, IRIX, GNU/Linux, BSD, and MacOS X running on anything from a PocketPC to an old Mac to a brand new PC.

"At the same time — ca. 1995 — the development of PD was started by Miller Puckette. He was aiming to remedy some weaknesses of Max in the field of dynamic data structure management, using some of the ideas of the ISPW (Ircam Signal Processing Workstation) Animal program. PD uses a two-component architecture similar to Max/FTS and brings portability to the graphical side via the adoption of the Tcl/TK toolkit.

Reusing the PD audio part, David Zicarelli released late 1997 the MSP ("Max Signal Processing") package for Max/Opcode that brings real-time synthesis and signal processing to Max/Opcode on PowerPC Macintosh platforms."

Source: http://freesoftware.ircam.fr/article.php3?id_article=5

CHRONOLOGY:

1998, January: Pd 0.20 released. "As Shigeru Kobayashi and Ron Kuivila pointed out, the NT version of Pd 0.19 wasn't wholly self-contained; I hadn't noticed some dlls I was using."
February: Mark Danks announces the release of GEM 0.72 — it is no longer in beta.
December: Paul Ossenbruggen has a very, very, very alpha version of Pd running on the Mac OS. "Obviously, Pd/GEM should be much easier on Carbon/OS X, so you might just want to skip 8.5"... "also on new-fast G3 macs it will maybe rock" ... "I would love to see a port to OS X Server".

1999, May: Farmers Manual do a web-streaming radio show in Hamburg.
June: "just installed pd-0.25TEST7 (which in fact shows TEST8 when started verbose .. ;) right now, on a red hat 5.2"
July: IRCAM releases jMax — "I downloaded and compiled under Mandrake Linux 6.0 jMax 2.4.5 last night - all the files I looked at stated that it was under GPL. It compiled and ran great!"
September: ost / farmers manual distributes "pdnetsend/pdnetreceive objects for max" at fals.ch
December: Pd is at version 0.28, GEM at 0.81.

2001, September: the Linux video externals Framestein version 0.15, by Juha Vehviläinen, are announced on the PD mailing-list.
November 25th: Olaf Matthes releases a 0.1 (beta) version of the shoutcast~ external, which allows "to stream two channels of mp3 encoded audio to a SHOUTcast server over a network / the internet from within pd".
December: Pd is at version 0.34, GEM at 0.84.

2002, February 3rd: new release of the shoutamp~ object — an icecast/shoutcast(soon) client for PD — is announced. It is co-authored by Olaf Matthes and Yves Degoyon. "it has only been tested with icecast on linux. it should be quite ok for shoutcast."
March: jdl at xdv.org is using the oggcast~ object by Olaf Matthes on linux. Damien Henry announces seg 0.04 — "it's just an experimental GUI for pure data that run on top of a standart pd instalation. (all platform)".
December: Mathieu Bouchard announces GridFlow 0.6.4. "this is the first version of GridFlow that actually works quite well with PureData". Pd is at version 0.36, GEM at 0.87.

2003, February: Framestein 0.32 is released.

2004, June 22-23: pd is used for audio and video streaming between Tarifa andTangiers during the Fada'íat event.


RELATED:
http://puredata.org/ - Pd community site
http://at.or.at/hans/pd/installers.html - A good place to download complete, ready-to-use versions of Pd (containing the PDP video objects)

http://pd-graz.mur.at/label/book01 - bang - a book containing essais and articles about Pure Data (also available as a free download)

"In Pd, however, we see the danger of losing sight of the essence of art precisely because it is a part of applied mathematics and logic similar to the early years of media art when the content of an installation sometimes seemed to lie in sending data packets from Linz to Tokyo, Sydney, New York, London and Paris and back again to Linz. (...) That the method of sensory exclusion which lies behind Pd holds certain dangers for dealing with structures of meaning is obvious, even when it is a matter of a method that largely shapes our everyday life and our everyday perception."
Thomas Musil / Harald A.Wiltsche: I'm the Operator with the Pocket Calculator - Some Reflections on Pure Data. - p.46

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