My goal with raytracing has always been to have fun and to encourage 
others to have fun with technology.  It's gratifying to hear that so 
many people have gotten so much out of it.  If I inspire anyone to learn 
about computers and graphics I'm delighted.

For myself, I'm President and CEO of a small company called Simberon. 
We do object-oriented consulting and training - primarily in the 
Smalltalk programming language (DKBTrace and POVRay were written in C 
but incorporate some object oriented concepts taken from my prior 
experience in Smalltalk).  I'm often asked to deliver courses on 
Smalltalk and I love teaching them.  One time when I was delivering a 
course, one of the students asked if Smalltalk could be used for 
computer graphics.  I asked what kind of graphics.  He said that he was 
doing raytracing.  I said that Smalltalk's floating point processing was 
normally a bit too slow for that and I asked what package he used for 
raytracing.  He said it was POVRay.  "Oh", I said coyly, "I wrote that". 
  I had my name on the whiteboard at the front and he looked at it and 
said "Are you the David Buck who wrote DKBTrace?" "Yes", I said.  "Wow", 
he said, "what a coincidence".  I just said "Not for me".

I then clarified that I wrote DKBTrace and helped with POVRay in the 
early days but many more people have made POVRay into the amazing 
package it is today.  I've had little involvement since the early 
1990's.  I still feel proud of what POVRay has become, though, and my 
part in making it.

Thanks for your story.  It warmed my heart.

David

On 2016-11-07 7:10 PM, [GDS|Entropy] wrote:
> I just want to say Thank You for writing DKBTrace, and Thank You to the entire
> Pov team for keeping the dream alive.
>
> With no jest, I would not be where I am in life right now without Pov-Ray; it
> introduced me to programming and got me hooked, now about 22yrs later I have
> worked for Fortune 100 and 500 companies and currently I am VP of Risk Tech and
> Principal Software Engineer/Architect with a multinational bank.
>
> I likely would have never developed an interest in any of this without the
> influence of Pov-Ray and this community.
>
> My sincere thanks for introducing me to the world of software and graphics.
>
> Ian McDonald
>
> 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.
>>
>> It's always fun watching what POV artists can do with the tool.  I still
>> use myself it from time to time.  In fact, I recently used POVRay to
>> render tiles in a game I'm developing for Android and iOS devices.
>>
>> I was wondering if anyone wanted to render any 25 year celebration
>> pictures.  I'd like to see what you can come up with.
>>
>> Post them in povray.binaries.images. I'll monitor that newsgroup for a
>> while as well as povray.general.
>>
>> Happy Birthday, POVRay.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> David K(irk) Buck
>
>
>
>
>

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