This astrology program is written in MBasic 80, Rev. 5.21, for CP/M computers. This program calculates the positions of the ten planets, including the sun and moon, and the twelve house cusps. These are the essential elements needed to draw up a horoscope. I chose the Placidus house system because I am familiar with it from Raphael's Table of Houses. The accuracy of the positions is generally exact, with deviations being no more than about 5 minutes of arc; deviations are likely to be due more to inaccuracy in entering the time of birth than to problems with the program. Enter the date of birth as the prompt (MM.DDYYYY) shows, e.g., you would enter October 16, 1985 as 10.161985. Respond to the AM*PM birth time prompt by typing in either AM or PM. The TIME prompt asks for the time as recorded on the birth certificate, which should be Standard Time. Astrologers who "know too much" should not enter Mean Local Time as the program automatically makes this adjustment. However, if Daylight Savings Time was in effect when the time was recorded it is important that an hour be subtracted from the birth time before entering the time. Also, if the birth occurred between either midnight or noon and 1 o'clock, do NOT enter the time as 12.xx, but as 00.xx, e.g., 12:42 at night would be AM and 00.42. TIME ZONE IN HOURS refers to the distance in hours between Greenwich Time and the time zone in which the birth time was recorded. Hours for the U.S. Standard Time zones are as follows: Atlantic 4 Eastern 5 Central 6 Mountain 7 Pacific 8 Yukon 9 Alaska- Hawaii 10 Bering 11 Although zones sometimes have irregular boundaries, the general rule is that time changes by 1 hour every 15 degrees of geographical longitude. Zones east of Greenwich Time are entered as negative hours, e.g., the zone in Paris, France is -1. Geographical LONGITUDE can be taken from any atlas. Longitudes west of Greenwich are positive. Longitudes east of Greenwich are negative. The longitude of Los Angeles is 118.15. The longitude of Paris, France is -2.20 Geographical LATITUDE is positive north of the equator, negative south of the equator. The latitude of Los Angeles is 34.03. The latitude of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil is -23.00. That's it. Be patient while it says "Calculating..." On a 4 MHz machine it takes about 1.3 minutes to calculate and print both the planetary positions and house cusps to the screen. If you want to save a hard copy and you don't have a "Print Screen" key, turn on the print feature with control-P before leaving CP/M for MBASIC. Or, if you like, go into the listing and EDIT lines 1800, 1805, 4803, & 4804 to change the PRINT commands to LPRINT. The program was assembled and adapted from the numerous subprograms contained in the Manual of Computer Programming for Astrologers by Michael Erlewine with acknowledgement to James Neely for the planetary routines. This book was published without copyright in 1980 by The American Federation of Astrologers, Inc. The book gives routines for calculating additional information of interest to astrologers (e.g., the aspects between the planets) and for printing the information in various formats. I did not judge these elements to be worth my trouble (the book's code requires considerable debugging) - I am not interested in providing people with a free do-it-yourself astrologer kit. It is a relatively easy matter for a decent astrologer to enter the information from this program onto a blank chart form and then identify the important planetary aspects. If you have printed out the horoscope positions of yourself or a friend and then want to know "But what does it mean?", I think the best book for interpreting horoscopes is Heaven Knows What by Grant Lewi; its companion volume is called Astrology for the Millions. John Halloran P.O. Box 75713 Los Angeles, CA 90075