At first, it was not the aim to write a raytracing program, because there
had already been a lot of raytracers.
But it was about the begin of the year 1990 that some collegue gave me some
book about C++ (Bjarne Stroustrup,
The C++ Programming Language)
and reading this book was like reading a wonderful story for me.
This was the programming language I had ever searched for!
First step was to to write a
class vector3
and some time later
I discovered the mystery of virtual functions.
Initially, there only was an 2D cut showing the reflections and transmission
of light rays trough a collection of spheres, but the simplicity of the
implementation in C++ gave rise to some further work. And so I got stuck...