NavList:

J Hardy, you wrote:
" 'The Electric Astrolabe' is a fully animated DOS planetarium program created by James E. Morrison under the publishing name Janus."

Aha! This is very nostalgic. :) More below...

You added:
"It is still available today."

I wouldn't put it that way. That's true only from a certain point of view. Saying it is "still available" would normally imply that it is still being developed in some sense. Instead, the link you provided is for an "abandonware" site, as Linda Mestas mentioned. That means the manager, or a fan, of that abandonware site found a very old zip of the app and uploaded it after determining (or assuming) that it is no longer protected by anyone with active IP (intellectual property) interests. It's a "dead" app that is "archived" there.

But back to that nostalgia! I have some real personal knowledge of the Electric Astrolabe and tested an early version of it. I communicated with James Morrison back around 1995 when he was actively developing the "Electric Astrolabe". We exchanged a bunch of emails, and we chatted on the phone. Back then I lived in Chicago. I think he was living in the area at that time, and he had personal contacts at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. The Adler has a serious collection of astrolabes, and they wanted an educational app that would run on a PC in an exhibit and provide an interactive demo of the operation of an astrolabe.

Unfortunately for the Adler exhibit, James took a deep dive in the hyper-nerd pool and turned this straight-forward project into an exercise in extreme DOS coding. In that "Appendix B" for the documentation of his app, you quoted his description: "The Electric Astrolabe consists of about 32,000 80386/80387 assembler statements in 36 modules coded for the Borland Turbo Assembler. About 20,000 statements are executable instructions,The Electric Astrolabe is a DOS program in order to allow high performance animation."

That's classic. That's a classic example of someone lost in the coding and forgetting the point of the project. It's also an exquisite example of a project so bounded by its author's limited horizons that it became frozen in one very narrow technological period. I recall vividly that James Morrison was very proud of his skill in "Borland Turbo Assembler" (a product I was familiar with back then), but he did not realize it was a perfect dead end. I also recall from one phone call that he was also convinced that he needed to reverse-engineer the (then new) TrueType font format and make it work under DOS for the next iteration of the Astrolabe app. Yet another dead end.

So much for the nostalgia! I agree with L. Mestas --100 percent-- that the "Electric Astrolabe" app is a relic. But you should not have been annoyed that she said that, or that I am agreeing with that assessment. THAT WAS NOT YOUR APP! You described it as an inspiration for your own project. Fine. There's nothing wrong with that, and it does not imply that your app is a relic. :)

Of your own app, you wrote:
"It is a proper VIRTUAL astrolable. You cannot take a Sun sight with it... but you can tell the azimuth and height of the visible planets, sun moon and some of the 57 nav. stars, within one degree with zero calculation, from almost anywhere on Earth"

Sounds good. The problem here is that you haven't helped us (or at least me! maybe I'm being slow...) understand what it is that makes your app unique. There are lots of astronomy apps. Please feel free to describe how your app works visually... what features it has... and what benefits it might have for a celestial navigation enthusiast. The floor is yours. :) 

The key here: tell us what makes your app special. There are hundreds of astronomy apps that can tell us the azimuths and angular altitudes of the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars from anywhere on Earth with zero calculation (as you put it). Here's a nice one that I found a few years ago online:
   https://ofrohn.github.io/celestial-demo/location.html.
And this is just some coder's pet project. He didn't bother marketing it or publicizing it. But it's really nice!

And there are text-based tools where you can read off the data without a graphic, like this little project I put together in less than two days based on my other apps at a time when the USNO website was offline for months:
   ReedNavigation.com USNO web app clone.

And of course there are fully-featured celestial visualization and simulation apps, like the very popular Stellarium. If you have not yet downloaded and experimented with Stellarium, go to the project website right now, right this very second!, and get a copy:
   stellarium.org.
There's a little learning curve, but you'll figure it out.

Frank Reed