A little bit of history

Flowmap was born in 1990, starting with the development of a simple program for the display of flows of goods and people on a map. The program was written by dr. Tom de Jong of Utrecht University (The Netherlands), as part of a research effort in cooperation with the Gadja Mada University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

This first version of Flowmap was especially targeted towards use in developing countries spatial planning. This implied that its hardware requirements had to be modest by the standards of the day. Hence, it required a simple DOS-based PC (any IBM-compatible type) with 640 Kb RAM, 5Mb of disk space and an EGA graphics card.

In subsequent years, its capabilities were extended with procedures for spatial clustering based on flow patterns, network distance calculations, accessibility analysis and gravity modelling. The last DOS-based version, 4.4, was released in january 1997.

In that same year the program was ported to Windows 3.11 (16-bits) and Windows 95 (32-bits) in a cooperative effort with the Transportek division of the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). In 2000, the Professional Edition was released, which made it possible to create and run log files.