Introduction
In 1985 I brought home a new shiny Commodore Amiga 1000, about one week after they were released. Coming with a whopping 512K of memory, programmable colormaps, a Motorola 68K CPU, and a modern multitasking operating system, it had “awesome” writ all over it. Metaphorically speaking, of course. I thought it might make a good platform for an astronomy program, as I could now control the colors of those star-things instead of having to settle for a lame fixed color palette forced upon me from the likes of Hercules or the C64. So I coded up a 24-line basic routine to draw a random star field, turned out the lights, and thought, “Wow! I bet I could write a cool astronomy program for that thing!” Twenty-six years later I am still working ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access