FAM was invented by Wiltse Carpenter, Brendan Eich, Bruce Karsh and Eva Manolis at Silicon Graphics (now SGI). FAM was written for IRIX by Bruse Karsh in 1988/89, and was rewritten in 1995 by Bob Miller. IMon was written in 1989 by Wiltse Carpenter, and ported to Linux by Roger Chickering. FAM was released as Open Source, and many changes and bug fixes were made by Roger Chickering, Wes Smith, and Rusty Ballinger. Many contributions have been made recently, especially by Alex Larsson of Red Hat.