History of NavPak
NavPak was written in 1984 to run on computers using the CPM operating system, and Timex Sinclair computers. These computers were some of the earliest portables. During the later half of the 1980s, NavPak was translated to run on IBM clones running MS DOS, and programmable graphic calculators. Much of the program development was done by the author during a 7 year circumnavigation on his 24' sailboat. An excellent computer rendering of the boat is shown here:
[ Click here to see sailboat ]

Some adventure stories of the author and his boat are here:
[ Click here for stories ]

Photographs of the boat are also shown on Bill Span's site.
[ Go to Pelican Pictures ]

The first half of the circumnavigation was done using NavPak on a Timex Sinclair, and the second half was done with NavPak running on various graphic calculators.

The early versions of NavPak used the spherical trigonometric engine and graphic plotting routines, which are the basis of the latest Windows versions. The early versions provided celestial sight reduction and plotting and great circle points, on a plotting sheet type screen. In practical use at sea, these programs showed that they helped to reduce errors and speed up the process of navigation.

In the early 1990s, NavPak was translated once again to run with MS Windows, version 3.1. Shortly after Windows 95 was released, NavPak-32 was developed. The 32 bit capability of this operating system gave a huge boost to the graphic display speed, and helped facilitate overlapped in/out of NMEA serial data. NavPak-16 is the final version for Windows 3.1, and will not be developed further. All future development will be with NavPak-32.

NavPak-32 continued to grow to a point where it had more functionality than the average user needed. In October 1998, NavPak-32 was renamed NavPak-Pro (Professional) and used as the basis for NavPak-Lite. NavPak-Lite is a basic chart viewer with GPS interface. Since October 1998, program development has continued on NavPak Professional Edition and NavPak Pocket Edition.
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