From: Philo, John <jphilo@amgen.com>
  To  : 'Demeler, Borries' <demeler@selway.umt.edu>
  Date: Thu, 10 Apr 1997 08:28:55 -0700

comment line length

Walt and Bo,

In the last 2 days each of you has sent me binary formats that contain
the same error.  The length of the comment line is no longer 80
characters.  When you are entering comments, the prompt line at the
bottom in the current Beckman software SAYS that the limit is 128
characters.  However, according to Don McRorie it actually won't let you
input more than 127.

No, they didn't tell anyone, did they?  Furthermore, the 127 character
limit isn't really quite correct either.  The version of the software I
am running (3.01h) puts a statement "cm/pixel:  0.0073157006, " before
the true comment on that line (the number of decimal places varies). So
you need to treat the comment as a variable-length string.  And I assume
you know that the file naming and sub-directory conventions that are
printed in the manual are also wrong.  

Does this illustrate the potential nightmare we could get into with
binary files, given the quality of the documentation we get? 

'Best,

John