Introduction

The word EPICS in the name of this blog is an acronym for the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System, which is both the name for a software toolkit and the international collaboration of engineers and software developers who have developed and used it to build control systems for
many different projects.

I am one of the maintainers of the central core of the EPICS toolkit known as EPICS Base, and I also keep most of the collaboration's facilities (the website, wiki, mailing lists etc.) running. The website is hosted at the Advanced Photon Source by my employer, Argonne National Laboratory, which was one of the founders of EPICS.

In this blog I hope to discuss current and future developments in the EPICS world and also reflect on the problems we have maintaining the code base, parts of which date from 1989. I would welcome additional authors from the EPICS community; this could become a community resource if it proves useful, but if not it'll probably die quietly (like so many other blogs nowadays).