The idea to write a spectrometer control software came to Boris Epel and Stefan Stoll at Spring 2001 in Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. At that time groups of Prof. Daniella Goldfarb and Prof. Arthur Schweiger from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Switzerland had been used the spectrometer control program written by Jaap Shane. Boris and Stefan wanted to perform a tricky experiment which required some program modification. After patching of Jaap's program and having free time and plenty of ideas Boris and Stefan established some basic principles of advanced program design and made a prototype of the new graphic user interface. It was decided to use the pulse programming language (PPL) and experiment structure of Jaap's program but completely modify the communication with devices and add new level of PPL customization. It was decided to implement these ideas 'sometimes'.

Project became more realistic after discussion with Igor Gromov from ETH. He also wanted to make some modification for Jaap's program and joined the SpecMan4EPR team at Fall, 2001. The programming language and main design objectives were chosen at that time.

First code of SpecMan4EPR was written during the visit of Boris to ETH at Spring 2002. This visit became possible due to the agreement between Prof. Daniella Goldfarb and Prof. Arthur Schweiger. At the end of the visit the first presentation about SpecMan was given. The slogan of the program "Connecting Spectrometers to People" was coined by Prof. Schweiger.

The prototype of the program was ready at Summer 2002. Still unstable and full of bugs, the program was found very useful for pulse ENDOR due to the random acquisition feature suggested by Stefan on early stages of development.

The first completely stable release of SpecMan4EPR (ver. 0.5) came from Max-Planck Institute for Bioinorganic Chemistry, Germany when Boris joined the group of Prof. Wolfgang Lubitz at Spring, 2003. In this release the static linkage of vendor's device libraries was substituted by the dynamic link. This made the program hardware environment independent.

At the end of 2003 (ver. 0.6.1) the pulse and device configurations wizards were implemented. New implementation of phase cycling allowed to perform CYCLOPS. At the beginning of 2004 the Scope was added to monitor transient signals.

After the period of gradual improvement the structure of the program was completely redesigned at Spring of 2006 on request from Dr. Reef Morse, Scientific Software Services. The development of client-server network edition (ver. 0.8.5) was started. Since then SpecMan4EPR has two different editions. The client-server edition became stable close to Spring of 2007 (ver. 1.1.1). At that time Boris joined the group of Dr. Howard J. Halpern, University of Chicago. Number of improvements had been made to apply the program for pulse EPR imaging.

In 2011 twelve EPR/NMR research groups around the world used the program.

The program is in continuous development. Current version (April 2023) is 3.4 64bit. Contact Boris Epel for the newest features update.