I concur that system generation and presentation was greatly limited,
back around 1980, by the need(s) to have Referees roll up entire systems
with a handful of d6s and list the results on a single line in a
digest-size pamphlet, as a hex string and a handful of special codes.
Many computer games of the period literally could not fit all of their
plaintext on the storage media, and had to resort to external books
(which doubled as copy protection).  And when computers WERE brought to
bear on the issue, the programs used were primitive and error-prone;
consider the first Atlas of the Imperium, and its notoriously bad
dataset, with whole sectors of bad output.

Today, forty years later, consumer-grade computers not only have
effectively infinite storage, from a 70s or 80s perspective, but can
procedurally generate a star system and simulate every body in it in
real time - down to the meter, in the case of the object being focused
on.  Combined with four decades of advances in astronomy and planetology
- including our knowledge of other planetary systems going from "pure
speculation and extrapolation from a single example" to "(indirect)
observation and (educated) guesswork" - and the good ol' UPP seems
positively /quaint/ but woefully incomplete, not unlike Ford Prefect's
two-word summary of Earth (which was further truncated by his editors).

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Kelly St. Clair
xxxxxx@efn.org