On 24/07/2020 15:14, Pekka Aho wrote:
> I found POV back in the late '93, when a family friend gave me a 3.5" disk with
> a version 2.0 on it. I think it was included on some PC magazine of that time
> and there was a huge article on 3D and ray-tracing. I remember printing out the
> whole povdoc file with our dot matrix printer, and oh the joy of even trying to
> render anything with a 386SX 16 MHz. :D Somewhere during the first half of '94
> we got a 486DX2 66 MHz in the house, and also got my hands on POV version 2.2,
> so things started rollin' wild for real. Although a ray-tracing joke for some,
> but at least I have ever since updated my comps according to how fast I can
> render with POV. :D

For me, I first came across raytracing in the late 80's when I
experimented with one on am Amiga. I don't recall which one it was but
remember that I liked the fact I could make decent-looking images by
typing rather than painting with a mouse (I'm no artist and can barely
draw a straight line).

In the early 90's I started working on a project where the product
rolled out to the customer needed to run on a high-end workstation (and
as such all the developers needed them too). The end result of this was
that shortly thereafter each of us had a very sweet (for the time) 60mHz
64-bit DEC Alpha tower loaded with 32MB of RAM appear under our desks.

Now compared to the typical PC of the day this was a monster. Most PC's
were still running 16-bit DOS and maybe had a few MB ram at most, and
here I was with a 64-bit footwarmer with 10x the RAM and 10x the speed
of my home PC that was sitting idle 99.9% of the time as we hadn't yet
written the applications they were bought for and had nothing else
really compute-intensive to run on them.

Obviously I wasn't going to let this remain the case. I needed something
to stress this beast out and given you can't really just pop into the
local computer store and come out with something that can run on OpenVMS
I needed to build it myself.

Since I had a Compuserve account I logged in and looked for a raytracer
that had source code available, found POV-Ray v1 then set about getting
it working under VMS. Once I did so I let the devs know about the port
(as there wasn't a VMS one available at the time).

A little later on we decided that OpenVMS wasn't going to cut it for the
project we were working on and switched to OSF/1, which was a
Mach-kernel based Unix variant for the Alpha (cue picture of me sitting
in front of a pile of about 40 3.5" floppies slowly feeding them one by
one ...)

I then built a console-based POV port for OSF/1 (not hard as it's pretty
straightforward) but as I wanted to be able to see render progress I
added code that would show a render preview via X Windows and
contributed that to the project as well. Somewhere in this timespan
Chris Young invited me to be the maintainer for the VMS or Unix port (or
both, don't quite recall) and here I am today.

-- Chris

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