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CDF was developed at the NASA Space Science Data Center at Goddard, and is freely available. It was originally a VMS FORTRAN interface for scientific data access. Unidata reimplemented the library from scratch to use XDR for a machine-independent representation, designed the CDL text representation for netCDF data, wrote a User's Guide and made other additions including aggregate data access, single-file implementation, named dimensions, and variable-specific attributes.
NetCDF and CDF have evolved independently. CDF now supports many of the same features as netCDF (aggregate data access, XDR representation, single-file representation, variable-specific attributes), but some differences remain (netCDF doesn't support native-mode representation, CDF doesn't support named dimensions).
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