Rayshade is a program for creating ray-traced images. It reads a description of a scene to be rendered and produces a photo realistic true color image corresponding to the description. Rayshade was designed to make it easy to create nice rendered pictures. It was also meant to be flexible, easy to modify, and relatively fast.
The first version of Rayshade was written in 1987-88 at Princeton University with help and encouragement from David Dobkin and David Hoffman. This version was heavily based on a public-domain "introductory" ray tracer written by Roman Kuchkuda.
Rayshade 4.0 was written by Craig Kolb and Rod Bogart during 1990-91, with contributions of ideas and code made by Mark Podlipec and many others.
If you have access to Internet and would like to join the Rayshade mailing list, please send mail to rayshade-request@cs.princeton.edu.