Yesterday's announcement about RoboHelp 6 has spawned multiple emails to different lists and several blog entries because of the version number. So I went looking in my favorite spot for RoboHelp release information, Rick Stone's RoboWizard.

Combined with my memory (which, granted, has some holes sometimes), I now present the following information.

RoboHelp version 8, also known as RoboHelp 2000, was released in...yeah, 2000. I remember this version well, because I wrote a book for Sam's Publishing in 1999 called "Teach Yourself RoboHELP 2000 for HTML Help". It was released early in 2000, right after the software itself.

RoboHelp 7 was released in January, 1999. This is another version I remember well, because we started 1998 with RoboHelp 5. In 13 months, Blue Sky Software released RoboHelp 5, 5.5, 6 (there it is!), and 7. It was hell being a RoboHelp trainer that year, because we were all updating our materials every 2.5 months trying to keep up.

I don't know why Adobe dropped the "X". After all, it's a lot easier to refer to X5 as opposed to RoboHelp Office X5. We can't just refer to "6" and hope that folks actually know what we're talking about. I'm thinking that maybe marketing got involved...by calling it "RoboHelp 6", they've just about guaranteed that the tool name will also be included.

It's just a thought ;-)