bfd: History

 
 1.1 History
 ===========
 
 One spur behind BFD was the desire, on the part of the GNU 960 team at
 Intel Oregon, for interoperability of applications on their COFF and
 b.out file formats.  Cygnus was providing GNU support for the team, and
 was contracted to provide the required functionality.
 
    The name came from a conversation David Wallace was having with
 Richard Stallman about the library: RMS said that it would be quite
 hard--David said "BFD". Stallman was right, but the name stuck.
 
    At the same time, Ready Systems wanted much the same thing, but for
 different object file formats: IEEE-695, Oasys, Srecords, a.out and 68k
 coff.
 
    BFD was first implemented by members of Cygnus Support; Steve
 Chamberlain ('sac@cygnus.com'), John Gilmore ('gnu@cygnus.com'), K.
 Richard Pixley ('rich@cygnus.com') and David Henkel-Wallace
 ('gumby@cygnus.com').