On Wed, 24 Mar 1999 14:57:36 +0100, Markus Becker <bec### [at] zessuni-siegende>
wrote:

>Q: What do you guys (and girls?) do besides raytracing?

A: Try to read all these postings!

Before retiring I was a mechanical engineer, and am now busier than ever and
don't do nearly enough raytracing. Hillwalking, amateur geology, cooking (and
eating!) all take time, along with holidays (just back from a geology expedition
to Tenerife and soon going to look at the Grand Canyon). Railway history is an
interest, hence my use of POV to try and accurately model historic steam
locomotives.  To justify this posting I have attached the tender for a
locomotive I posted last year.  The leaf springs are actually nicely detailed
but because of the resolution show as an unfortunate moire pattern.

While off topic, do any of you guys know about APT, a program and language
developed by Doug Ross of MIT in the mid 60's for defining geometry and guiding
a cutting tool on an NC milling machine?  I like to think of APT an ancestor of
POV-ray. It was one of the first computer applications using every-day english
words like CIRCLE, LINE, SPLINE, CUTTER etc. and had a good range of 3D
geometry.  Like POV the source was freely available. Also like POV you often had
to be quite ingenious to get it to produce what you were after. In those days
you needed a multi-million dollar Univac or IBM installation to run APT, whereas
nowadays, my humble PC could eat it.  What will the next 30 years bring I
wonder?
David
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dav### [at] cwcomnet
http://www.hamiltonite.mcmail.com
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