History

Although, fortunately, GAP is not yet part of history, we have kept a few documents marking steps of its development. In particular, the prefaces of the manuals of the various releases sketch the respective progress. We present here links to (relevant extracts from) these prefaces as well as to some ‘interim reports’ that appeared in the GAP Forum. (For recent developments see the Release history.)

• Preface for GAP 2.4, the first publically released version of GAP (JN, December 1988)
• Preface for GAP 3.1 (JN, March 1991)
• From the preface for GAP 3.2 (JN, January 1993)
• Preface for GAP 3.4.3, the last GAP 3 release from Aachen (JN, June 1994)
• Interim Report GAP, 1997, me and all that (JN, June 1995)
• Interim Report Organizing GAP (JN, December 1995)
• Interim Report A European summer of CGT ‘97 (JN, July 1996)
• Interim Report WWW pages and refereeing (SL + JN, September 1996)
• From the preface for GAP 3.4.4 (SL, April 1997)
• Interim Report Move of GAP addresses (JN, June 1997)
• Forum letter Contributions to GAP (CW, July 1997)
• From the preface for GAP 4.B.1, the first beta release of GAP 4 (JN, July 1997)
• From the preface for GAP 4.1 (SL, July 1999)
• Preface for GAP 4.3 (SL, May 2002)
• Preface for GAP 4.4 (AH, March 2004)
• Preface for GAP 4.5 (June 2012)

GAP Council

The GAP Council was formed in 1995 to provide broad policy advice for the future development of GAP. It served as an editorial board for GAP packages until 2024, but its interests extend more broadly, to include enhancing recognition not only of GAP itself but also of the whole field of computational group theory.

GAP Centres

In March 2005 the GAP Council and the GAP developers have agreed that status and responsibilities of “GAP Headquarters” should be passed to an equal collaboration of a number of GAP Centres, where there is permanent staff involvement and an element of collective or organisational commitment, while fully recognising the vital contributions of many individuals outside those Centres.