{"id":1862,"date":"2013-10-03T16:07:48","date_gmt":"2013-10-03T14:07:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/andreaszapf.de\/blog\/?p=1862"},"modified":"2013-10-03T16:41:18","modified_gmt":"2013-10-03T14:41:18","slug":"astronomy-on-your-own-computer-where-it-all-began","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/andreaszapf.de\/blog\/?p=1862","title":{"rendered":"Astronomy on your own Computer – where it all began"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sometimes, you just need luck. For quite a while now, I have been looking for an old computer program called Skyplot<\/em>. Next to some very cold nights out under a clear Bavarian sky back in 1985, this is probably what sparked my initial interest in the skies above – and although I did not touch a Schneider CPC Computer for more than 30 years, I never forgot about Skyplot<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The program is rare – I found some people on the Classic Computer Forum and they rendered some help (including the offer to send a copy over on a 3″ Disk) but I was after the original listing (or at least a scan thereof). And then I bought ZX81 Magazine<\/a> on eBay. And it just crossed my mind to see what else the seller had on sale – a couple of CPC Magazines along. And then, there was a copy of a magazine from Austria – released in January 1987… I took a look… and there it was… right on the cover!<\/p>\n

From the Magazine to the PC…<\/h2>\n

I have written about getting the code from the magazine<\/a> into the system using Scanning, OCR and Notepad++ – I am not going to repeat the story here. I placed the initial, uncleaned text file right in Subversion to have a baseline in case anything goes wrong and started cleaning the code in Notepad++.<\/p>\n

\"Code<\/a>You may already be able to pick up some of the more obvious problem areas:<\/p>\n