DKBTrace

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DKBTrace was a graphical ray tracing program which was the forerunner of POV-Ray. It had no GUI and ran via the command line. It featured quadric shapes (spheres, ellipsoids, planes, etc), constructive solid geometry (intersection, difference, union), and procedural textures like wood and marble.

It was originally written for the Amiga by David Kirk Buck (1986). Aaron A. Collins ported it to the PC and worked with David to produce subsequent versions. The last version (DKBTrace 2.12) was built in 1991 and ran on Unix systems, PCs and Amigas. Version 2.12 was released to the POV-Ray team to use as the basis of POV-Ray.

Some early POV-Ray history written by David K. Buck is available at the POV-Ray site:

Some of the old versions of DKBTrace are still available on the Aminet site. They were also released on disks 397, 513, and 514 of the famous Fish disks distributed by Fred Fish.