A program called "seg" begat "cardviews" and "cardviews" begat "nvm". Read the complete History.
Andrew J. Worth created nvm by duplicating and expanding the features of "cardviews", the main software tool from the MGH Center for Morphometrics Analysis.
Sean C. McInerney wrote the OpenGL portions of nvm, created the zoom tool, added the hooks to VTK, squashed many bugs and cleaned up nvm code in uncountable ways.
Matthias Melcher did the original ports of nvm for Windows and Macintosh OS X.
Larry Simmers was the Chief Developer of nvm in 2003-2004.