It's impressive how many pages are devoted to creating the universe in the book. Back then you didn't just fire up the OpenGL library to initialize the stack. This book starts off with how to set the registers on your VGA card to put it in the right mode, how to read in bitmaps and their palettes from the disk, how to write your own run length encoder to save memory on those bitmaps, what registers to set on the joystick port, and so on.