And the Winner Is!

[Tom Droege <tdroege@veriomail.com>]

Unbeknownst to them, Andrew and Rob have been in a race to be the first to 
get a SHELL program to write files to the disk.  Andrew has now sent in a 
program that appears to work.  It runs in 35 seconds on the 500 MHz K6, vs 
67 seconds with the QBasic program.  This is almost a factor of two, and 
further eliminates the RawToFits conversion.

Andrew has sent in at least 3 programs for test, and Rob is on version 
9.  So it has been a busy couple of days.  Rob has been learning to make 
CFITSIO work instead of writing the header by hand, so it is a longer 
learning process for him.

Rob's program shows signs of running in 20 seconds.  So I am encouraging 
him to keep working on it.  Thus there can be two winners in this 
race.  The first and the fastest.

There is still some work to be done to make it completely useful to me.  It 
is better than what I presently have, but I am greedy, and will want to put 
more things in the .fts header than Andrew has at present.

I am very pleased.  This will be very useful to me and will encourage me to 
keep working on the hardware.

Tom Droege