ORCA evolved from SHaRC, an Object-Oriented DAQ programming project carried out by John Wilkerson and Frank McGirt at LANL in the 1980's and further refined by Mark Howe and others at the Center for Nuclear Physics and Astrophysics (CENPA) at the University of Washington during the 1990's. In fall of 2008, ORCA support followed Mark to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

ORCA is written in Obj-C using the Cocoa framework and the Apple developer tools. Work on ORCA began in ernest in Nov 2002 at CENPA under the direction of John Wilkerson. It was written almost entirely by Mark Howe, with help from Frank McGirt (drivers) and Jan Wouters (GPIB objects). ORCA is currently maintained by Tom Caldwell.

OrcaROOT is a separate application that processes the ORCA data stream, either at run-time or post-run, into ROOT trees for analysis. It also acts as a curving fitting service for ORCA. It was written in C++ by Jason Detwiller and is now being maintained by Mike Marino.

ORCARoot Documentation (Opens a new window)