I can remember having the idea for raytracing as early as 1981 or so.  I 
came up with the idea independently - I wasn't aware of Turner Whitted's 
article on raytracing. The problem was that the computer I had at the 
time didn't have the graphics capability to display raytraced scenes. 
The idea didn't go beyond the idea phase but I do remember that it was a 
raytracing approach.

It was 1986 when I had an Amiga that a friend of mine brought over a 
Unix raytracer written in C.  It rendered only gray scale images and 
only spheres but I was blown away by the images.  I played with it for a 
while but decided I could do better writing my own from scratch.

I must say that the best part was when I implemented procedural 
textures.  Seeing marble, wood and water textures for the first time was 
pure joy.  I was always amazed by pictures in the SIGGRAPH proceedings 
and with DKBTrace I could create pictures just like that.  It was amazing.

I took a lot of inspiration from Ken Perlin's article "An Image Processor"

http://www.sci.utah.edu/~kpotter/Library/Papers/perlin:1985:IS/

I went through that paper several times over and implemented those 
techniques into DKBTrace.  I still find them amazing.

David



On 2016-11-04 12:23 AM, omniverse wrote:
>
> Incredible! No. Not what you're thinking probably, incredible that you're 4
> years younger than me! ha!
>
> I was so grateful when on CompuServe I stumbled across your ray tracer way back
> in 1991 or '93 (I forget now). The search was on for something more than
> ordinary image creation and that was the first I learned of ray tracing. I never
> wrote a program, having only Fortran and Basic (and its variants) know-how so I
> decided to leave that to others like you.
>
> I found the old Ray Tracing News is still online (with broken links of course)
> and gives some insight to the timeline and what was out there. Before and after
> this has more of DKBTrace if you navigate around using the contents link there,
> then RTN "guide" link.
>
> http://jedi.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/raytracer/rtn/rtnv4n3.html
>
> Tells of "PV-Ray", misspelled or not, from 1991. Look for it before the bottom
> of the web page.
>
> Thanks many times over for your work getting POV-Ray started.
>
> Bob
>
> David Buck <dav### [at] simberoncom> wrote:
>> I was just thinking that it's been 25 years since POVRay was created
>> based on DKBTrace.  When DKBTrace was first released, I was 24 years
>> old.  I was 29 when we released POVRay 1.0.  I'm now 54 years old and
>> POVRay is still going.

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