Happy Birthday, FITS!

[Don Wells]

I consider March 28th to be the birthday for FITS, because it was on
March 28, 1979, that Eric Greisen and I completed the Basic FITS
Agreement. FITS is a teenager -- today is its 17th birthday.  

HISTORY: See http://fits.cv.nrao.edu/documents/overviews/history.news
for the history of the Basic FITS Agreement..

REPRINTS: I still have original reprints of four FITS papers:

* 14 copies of the first FITS    paper (SPIE vol.264 1980)
* 15 copies of the Basic FITS    paper (A&A Supplement Series 1981)
* 25 copies of the Random Groups paper (A&A Supplement Series 1981)
* 22 copies of the Binary Tables paper (A&A Supplement Series 1995)

I will send sets of these reprints, in the order that requests are
received, until the supply is exhausted.

INCUNABULA: A small collection of early FITS files is located at 
    http://fits.cv.nrao.edu/data/tests/incunabula/
(or ftp://fits.cv.nrao.edu/fits/data/tests/incunabula/)
I will be very pleased to receive copies of other early FITS files
which I can add to this collection. I will be especially pleased to
receive any files with DATE values on or before June 1981, when the
Basic_FITS paper was published. Please look around your offices and
labs for _old_ FITS files and inform me of their existence, so that we
can make arrangements for copying them to the incunabula directory.

Don Wells (Chair, IAU FITS Working Group)
--
  Donald C. Wells         Associate Scientist         dwells at nrao.edu
                    http://fits.cv.nrao.edu/~dwells
  National Radio Astronomy Observatory                +1-804-296-0277
  520 Edgemont Road,   Charlottesville, Virginia       22903-2475 USA