> --- In guide-user@y..., Paul Schlyter <pausch@s...> wrote:
>
>> I fully agree with all that. To this, add that Guide often is first
>> with some feature: it was first in including the Guide Star
>> Catalogue,
>
> I'm pretty sure that Megastar came with GSC even when it was
> distibuted on floppies (several tens of them!).
"Several tens" of floppies wouldn't be enough to store the entire
GSC, instead hundreds of floppies would be needed! Remember that the
GSC contains some 14 million stars, so if data about all these stars
were stored on, say, 30 floppies, you'd have to squeeze the info
about each star into a mere 3 bytes !!! That's not much....
> Guide had it all on CD from day one,
Perhaps that's why Bill named the package "Guide" ... because it
contained the Guide Star Catalog ???
> so it clearly was the way to go.
>
> Congrats to Bill for G8! I hope the wait was worth it...
>
> Jari
I noticed this the other day: the release years for the various versions
of Guide have been:
Guide ver 2: 1993
Guide ver 3: 1994?
Guide ver 4: 1995?
Guide ver 5: 1996
Guide ver 6: 1997
Guide ver 7: 1998
------------------
Guide ver 8: 2002
(I'm not certain about the release years of Guide ver 3 and 4 since I
skipped these versions, but one release per year fits the general
pattern)
But it took 4 years from Guide 7 to Guide 8. I guess we know hte
reason though: except being a complex upgrade, Bill was also busy
with other stuff, such as computing orbits for newly discovered
planetary satellites. And during that time he got an asteroid named
after himself.