In April 2015 I became curious again about a piece of Amiga history, this being the Amiga Juggler demo which first appeared in 1986. I was sixteen years old at the time, and all I could do was stare at the Amiga in the shop window running the animation...
Research led me to Ernie Wright's article on the juggler demo, which both describes the history and the technology behind the demo in great detail. Even better, he ported the raytracer code to JavaScript and documented its operations and overall design.
This JavaScript version is based upon the 1987 "raytracer 1.0", which was provided by Eric Graham on floppy disk upon request. A copy of that disk can be found on Patrick de Zoete's home page. That disk not only contains two different versions of the Juggler demo, but also the raytracer source code in two different versions as well. One version of the raytracer is written in AmigaBASIC, and the other is written in 'C'. Also included are three scenery files, but as far as I can tell, there is no program included on the disk which can read or render these scenery files.
(more to follow)