The project was initiated by Tim Hayes and Jim Boyce in the mid 1970s. At this point the main focus was on providing and promoting fitting in r-space as the proper way to handle peak overlap as well as providing a superior statistical basis.  Jim Boyce took over leadership in the mid 1980s and Frank "Bud" Bridges joined the project in the late 1980s. At that point, Prof. Bridges took on management, hosting the project at the University of California (Santa Cruz), and began adding various improvements, especially a partially-automated method for determining mu_0, an iterative background technique, self-absorption corrections, batch processing, and more. Bud continues to work on the project, but in 1999, his former graduate student Corwin Booth took over management and hosted the project at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, where it currently resides. More recent improvements include a better implementation of self-absorption corrections, more robust error analysis, porting to linux and Windows, better XANES analysis, etc.