History of WebGPSS
GPSS originated within IBM already in the 1960s and has since then, accumulated over the years, been the most widely used package for discrete-event simulation, implying that there are a great amount of GPSS programs and text books available.
WebGPSS is a streamlined version of GPSS. WebGPSS is the result of an educational development process, based on feedback from many of the over 8000 students that we have taught GPSS. We started teaching IBM GPSS in the late seventies at the Stockholm School of Economics. Since our students experienced several problems with this GPSS version, we started to develop our own GPSS version. Our efforts were focused on creating a GPSS version that would be very easy to learn and use.
Initially, our GPSS was text based, just like the other GPSS versions. In the late eighties we got funds from the Swedish KK-foundation to develop a Web based GPSS, as part of their efforts of supporting new Web-based teach-ware. The new software, WebGPSS, was not only web-based, developed in Java, but an easy-to-use GUI was also added. This development was a co-operative effort involving, among others, the KK-foundation, the Stockholm School of Economics, the University of Karlskrona/Ronneby (now Blekinge Technical University) and FLUX Software Engineering (now AcobiaFLUX). The first version of WebGPSS was released in 1999. It was at first only available as an Applet on the Web.
Due to problems with accessing the server from other countries, there
was a demand for a stand-alone version for Windows on a CD. Furthermore,
some features first only available in the text based
version, GPSS.EXE (called micro-GPSS), were gradually made
available also in WebGPSS. The continued development of WebGPSS was done
by Acobia-Flux and lately
by Beliber. The development efforts
continue and the present version 1.18 will sometimes during early 2009 be
followed by 1.19. Upgrades will then be made available at a low cost.