This year marks 30 years since the first public release of IRAF (on magtape) to a handful of lucky sites. Since then, more than 100 external packages have been developed and the latest release is in use by more than 5000 users in >60 countries around the world. On average, somebody somewhere in the world starts up the CL every 15 seconds of every day.

Although active development has ramped down considerably in recent years, use of IRAF remains heavy and continues to enable science by the community to the tune of ~800 journal papers/year. We would appreciate hearing your experiences/remembrances of IRAF in the comments section below.

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