  The General Single-Dish Data format (GSDD) was developed in the mid-1980s as
a data model to support centimeter, millimeter and submillimeter
instrumentation at NRAO, JCMT, the University of Arizona and IRAM. We provide
an overview of the GSDD requirements and associated data model, discuss the
implementation of the resultant file formats, describe its usage in the
observatories and provide a retrospective on the format.
