>And yes, on the previous page in the magazine

there's a flashier ad

>or Megastar promising more. It sold for "only"

$139 + shipping, so
<it wasn't really difficult to decide on Guide.
Besides, I had just a

>few weeks earlier bought a CD drive.

These old days ! In that time I had written my own
(primitive) starmap
program based on the SAO catalog (on a XT
compatible with 640 kB of
memory and 20 MB of hard disk space). Compressing
and rearranging the
data from the original disks (360 kB floppies) to
less than 2 MB was
quite an effort. The completed program could
generate finder charts for comets
with stars to mag 9 to 10.

I wanted to expand it to also use the GSC in 92
and had
also ordered the 2 GSC CDs for about 50$. In that
days CDs were quite
uncommon, and I just had installed one (single
speed, price about
200 $) into my new 486 DX (off the shelf
computers did not
include a CD drive).

After writing some lines of
code to access the data, and thinking of
strategies of how to select the data for
rapid map-plotting I first noticed that very small
add in S&T. It claimed
that a program named GUIDE should plot GSC based
star charts, but I
was not amazed. Indeed there was a lousy
screenshot of the
big dipper with limiting mag 5.5 on the add. Also
I had doubts if one could
really generate a useful finder chart of a comet
(add was looking too similar
to any of these terrible planetarium programs
common these days, and even
early Megastar versions had problems with plotting
areas near the pole).
Well, some months later there was another add. The
screenshot in the add
was still lousy, but it claimed that you could
"ADD YOUR OWN COMETS",
and that the GSC was on the CD. I was hooked and
decided to order Guide 1.0
and give it a try.
The CD arrived about a week later. I remember
being forced to attend
a completely boaring seminary with the envelope
with the CD in my pocket
reading the manual....

That evening I gave it a test, and that LONG
thrilly night I tried all the features.
WOW !!!! WHAT AN AMAZING THING ! Super fast (it
was faster in plotting
the GSC than mine for plotting the SAO!), super
quality printout (on my
nine needle STAR NL-10) - and one could really add
and edit own comet
data. I never wrote a single line of source of my
program
since then :-)
Really it was easier to program some output
routines for my ephemeris
program to produce overlay files (since Bill was
deliberately making
his binary formats available upon request) than to
try to make an own
charting software. From Guide 4.0 my ephemeris
program could place date
lables into finder charts (the latest updates of
Guide 7.0 can do this).

I had wrote some positive test reports in German
amateur journals. Word spread
of this excellent program, and lateron the
software became quite popular in this country.
With Guide 4.0 and 5.0 Jost Jahn (now our group
moderator), Eric Vesing (now
Guide reprsentative for Germany) and myself were
involved in creating
a first German manual and menu system.

In fact, that day when I secretely read the Guide
1.0 manual below my
table is much less than a decade ago...

Hartwig Luethen
Institut fuer Allgemeine Botanik
Ohnhorststr. 18
22609 Hamburg
Tel: 040-42816337
priv: Behnstr. 13,
22767 Hamburg
Tel:040-3800551
email: h.luthen@...-hamburg.de
email: h.luethen@...
-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: James Ellis <ejge24@...>
An: guide-user@yahoogroups.com
<guide-user@yahoogroups.com>
Datum: Samstag, 12. Januar 2002 12:38
Betreff: Re: [guide-user] Re: ...software...


Jari