POV-Ray

The Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer, most commonly acronymed as POV-Ray, is a cross-platform ray-tracing program that generates images from a text-based scene description. It was originally based on DKBTrace, written by David Kirk Buck and Aaron A. Collins for Amiga computers. There are also influences from the earlier Polyray raytracer because of contributions from its author, Alexander Enzmann. POV-Ray is free and open-source software, with the source code available under the AGPL-3.0-or-later license. Sometime in the 1980s, David Kirk Buck downloaded the source code for a Unix ray tracer to his Amiga. He experimented with it for a while and eventually decided to write his own ray tracer named DKBTrace after his initials. He posted it to the "You Can Call Me Ray" bulletin board system (BBS) in Chicago, thinking others might be interested in it. In 1987, Aaron A. Collins downloaded DKBTrace and began working on an x86 port of it. He and David Buck collaborated to add several more features. When the program proved to be more popular than anticipated, they could not keep up with demand for more features. Thus, in July 1991, David turned over the project to a team of programmers working in the "GraphDev" forum on CompuServe. At the same time, David felt that it was inappropriate to use his initials on a program he no longer maintained. The name "STAR-Light" (Software Taskforce on Animation and Rendering) was initially used, but eventually the name became "PV-Ray", and then ultimately "POV-Ray" (Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer), a name inspired by Dalí's painting, The Persistence of Memory. Features of the application, and a summary of its history, are discussed in a February 2008 interview with David Kirk Buck and Chris Cason on episode 24 of FLOSS Weekly. POV-Ray has matured substantially since it was created.