Coming a bit late to the discussion, life and all kinds of twists and turns been
getting on the way. I can see a lot of concerns being raised, as well as light
being shed on a good deal of stuff already. Important info on eg. the state of
development, things lurking in the background, even some history and what it has
been taking for making POV go through all these years and having it working on
modern equipment. My humble thanks for all that indeed! :)

At this point I'm afraid I haven't got much to say what it comes to for example
hopping along in development, coding, maintenance etc., sadly it's all way
outside of my expertise and capabilities. However, as both an active long time
POV user and as visiting the news groups pretty much on a daily basis, I'd like
to express my most sincere gratitude for the existence of POV-Ray as a whole.

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

All the way up to this day and through every official version over the years,
POV has been my main software of choice. In some random utility sense I've used
for example TopMod, Silo 2 Pro, Wings 3D and PoseRay in my workflow for certain
projects, but in the end it's always been the POV SDL environment where I really
feel at home. Nothing else comes even close, and using any other software almost
feels like a sacrilege. :D Back in the past I tried some old trial version of
Moray, but didn't really get the hang of it. Perhaps, if it ever sees a
comeback, I'd surely give it a new try though!

Now after all this time and many great years of POVing, I'm just so unspeakably
happy that POV is still around. From the bottom of my heart I wish things would
turn out well so we could have POV with us for the next 25 years as well!
Cheers! :)

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