CORTEX has been gone through so many transitions over the decades that it is daunting to list everyone who has contributed to its development. Dr. Robert Desimone, who has overseen and guided the development of CORTEX since he initially ported it from the PDP-11 platform over a decade ago, made a valiant effort to do so several years ago. This is quoted below in the History section.

• Thomas M. White - the lead programmer for CORTEX from 1989-1997. Re-wrote CORTEX from scratch, implemented the in-line compiler (the CORTEX state system - CSS), real-time multi-threaded data collection system, and support for multiple touch screens, graphics boards, and data acquisition systems. He also wrote the initial procortex, Stats100, and Grast utility programs. Upon leaving his work on CORTEX he went on to earn his MD degree from Cornell University.

• Trina M. Norden-Krichmar - took over the role of lead programmer from Tom White in the fall of 1997. She added a Windows DirectX receive program, support for DirectX sound and movies, and support for PCI data acquisition boards. She is currently working on the implementation of a Windows version of the send program, supporting the DOS version, and updating the documentation.

• Jessica Benson - rejoined the Cortex Team in the summer of 2004 after a year absence and is back working on device drivers, Install Shield, updating the website and documentation, fixing bugs and testing. She worked on the Cortex Team from the summer of 2001 to the summer of 2003 writing the Visual C++ and MFC code to transform Cortex into the wonderful dialog boxes and menus that you see today.

• Eric Boulden - worked on the Cortex Team from the summer of 2003 to the summer of 2004. He converted the old-fashioned Cortex web site into a slick PHP/MySQL database driven web site. He also added an InstallShield-based installation to VCortex, converted the drivers for the Random Spike Device and PCI-DIO24 board for Windows 2000 and XP version, and was involved in bug fixes, testing, and documentation.

Others who have contributed substantially to CORTEX include:

• Dr. Steve Macknik - wrote the TIGA and MGL graphics modules, as well as the entire User's manual.

• Dr. Andrew Mitz - helped write the technical manual, and contributed several user-accessible functions to CSS.

• Jamie Mazer - contributed the Set module and several user-accessible functions to CSS.

• Dr. Earl Miller - overhauled and maintains the Grast program for graphical analysis of CORTEX data files.

• Robert Baumann - developed the CORTEX Windows Suite - a set of tools to facilitate the analysis of CORTEX data files.

• Giuseppe Bertini - helped design the old-fashioned Cortex web site - especially the framed function reference, and is valiently trying to help keep the user's manual up to date.

It is currently impossible to list all of the people who have helped in the development of CORTEX, through their suggestions, testing, and bug-reports. The History section below acknowledges those who were most helpful in CORTEX's early years.

The remote ancestor of Cortex can be traced to an assembly language program for collecting spike data and controlling an optical bench, written for the PDP-12 by David Bender in Charlie Gross' lab at Princeton during the early 1970's. The PDP-12 was a state-of-the art laboratory computer with 8K of core memory (and a 12 bit word), a bit-mapped graphics display, a real-time programmable clock, and analog and digital interfaces built in. After Dave left Princeton for Buffalo, I assembled the necessary components for a PDP-11 system (which, shockingly!, had no lab interfaces built in) and sketched the requirements for a new spike collection program that could make use of the luxurious 64K of memory (and 2.5 MB hard disk!) that was then available. The core of this program was written in 1980 in Whitesmith's C by a moonlighting mathematician, Phil Thrift, and a high school student who had been programming in C since age 12. When I left Princeton for NIMH, the program branched in its development. One branch continued to be developed at Princeton by Tom Albright, and the other branch developed at NIMH. Jeff Moran at NIMH significantly rewrote the program, then called "Behave", and added modules for controlling the monkey's behavior and controlling an external Jupiter Graphics system for presenting stimuli.

As to be expected, a memory size that once seemed luxurious eventually became ridiculously too small. After the introduction of the IBM-AT, Stan Schein and I decided to switch from the PDP-11, in part because of the great difference in price and in part because the C compilers for the AT allowed transparent access to 640K of memory, whereas it was difficult to use more than 64K on the PDP-11. A Pepper SGT graphics card from Number Nine Computer was eventually chosen to replace the Jupiter graphics system. Stan, who moved from NIH to Harvard Medical School, hired Thuan Tran, then a computer science student at MIT to port the program after I had naively (and innocently!) assured Stan that the porting would take at most six weeks, once we understood all of the new hardware. Because the old program was inflexible and filled with kludges to get around memory limitations, Thuan did not actually port it. Although he retained a few design aspects of the original PDP-11 program, he completely rewrote and greatly expanded the program over the course of the next couple of years after graduating from MIT, with direction on the design by Stan and myself and support from Stan's grant (R01-EYO6096).

In 1989, Thuan took a full time job with a computer company but continued to work part-time on the state-system interface to Cortex, on contract to NIMH. At about the same time, I hired Tom White at NIMH, and he significantly rewrote most of Cortex again, in order to make it more user friendly, to greatly upgrade its stimulus display capabilities, and to improve the maintainability of its source code. He also took over the development of GRAST, a histogram display program, and Procortex and STATS100, numerical analysis programs, greatly expanding and rewriting them over the course of the past year. Tom integrated STATS100 with SYSTAT, a commercial statistical program, and wrote a data analysis compiler that users can use to write their own analysis routines, without doing any actual programming. Tom is now at Cornell Medical School in an MD/PhD program, but continues to work on Cortex occasionally, out of the goodness (truly) of his heart. I myself work on Cortex code, in my spare milliseconds, and am reasonably familiar with the workings of most of the modules. Rosalyn Merrill (NIMH), Amir Geva, and Jeff Moran also worked on small pieces of code for either Cortex or GRAST at one time during their development. Most recently, Marcello Gattass, the brother of Ricardo Gattass, has taken over the development of GRAST for the time being. Marcello promises a MS Windows version of GRAST sometime in the future. Steve Wise at NIMH has contributed towards some of the considerable development expense of Cortex. Finally, Cortex has benefited from the suggestions (and, unfortunately, bug-finding) of many of its users, particularly Mark Wessinger, Lin Li, Sidney Lehky, John Duncan, Earl Miller, Jennifer Hart, Driss Boussaoud, Josef Rauschecker, Ricardo Gattass, Leonardo Chelazzi, Andy Mitz, Richard Jeo, Carl Olson, Rebecca Hoag, and Peter DeWeerd.