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  70. <h3 class="section">1.1 History</h3>
  71. <p>One spur behind BFD was the desire, on the part of the GNU 960 team at
  72. Intel Oregon, for interoperability of applications on their COFF and
  73. b.out file formats. Cygnus was providing GNU support for the team, and
  74. was contracted to provide the required functionality.
  75. </p>
  76. <p>The name came from a conversation David Wallace was having with Richard
  77. Stallman about the library: RMS said that it would be quite hard&mdash;David
  78. said &ldquo;BFD&rdquo;. Stallman was right, but the name stuck.
  79. </p>
  80. <p>At the same time, Ready Systems wanted much the same thing, but for
  81. different object file formats: IEEE-695, Oasys, Srecords, a.out and 68k
  82. coff.
  83. </p>
  84. <p>BFD was first implemented by members of Cygnus Support; Steve
  85. Chamberlain (<code>sac@cygnus.com</code>), John Gilmore
  86. (<code>gnu@cygnus.com</code>), K. Richard Pixley (<code>rich@cygnus.com</code>)
  87. and David Henkel-Wallace (<code>gumby@cygnus.com</code>).
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