> It's interesting to note that most of the Maksutov development that John
> published has been improved, John attributes this to the development of the
> computer and the many orders of magnitude increase in the speed of
> optimizing and experimenting with optical designs. He tells me that his
> current G-M design is much better than the one he worked up in the '50's.
Yes! I remember very well trying to do ray tracing on an SR-53 (Texas programmable calculator). It was really, really painful, especially because you had to repunch the program every time (thing didn't have non-volatile memory)! It took ages to get 10 rays thru 3 surfaces. Then ZX-Spectrum came along; what a relief - programs (written in basic) could be much bigger, and stored away on a cassete tape - what a luxury! Today we take for granted awesome power of home PCs whizzing thousands of rays in only few seconds and having smart optimizing routines "on call". I really appreciate perserverance and stamina of people who did optical design in pre-computer era. Hats off !
> What I hope to do is get John Gregory in front of my computer and Log-On
> with us. He has many, many fascinating experiences to share. I hope he'll
> also be ready to publish some of his latest work.
It would be a fantastic experience to have one of few living legends in optical design on line ! Maybe we should try to restrain ourselves and not overwhelm the man with an avalanche of questions (which in many cases could be answered easily by reading readily available books)? How about you Steve being a front-end "moderator" ?
Bratislav