Povray clearly holds a special place for many of us. For me it was the first use (via slow dial up) to access HENSA (higher ed national software archive) in the

Povray clearly holds a special place for many of us. For me it was the first use (via slow dial up) to access HENSA (higher ed national software archive) in the uk for public domain software, and this by itself was mind blowing, in between dealing with my mother keeping picking the other phone up and dropping the connection. The batch processing tools of that era for graphics were qualitatively different from the real time interactive editors. There is something to be said for the imperfect serendipity that would result. The closest thing these days, oddly, is ML training, where part of the appeal is the sense the computer is working super hard for you. Were you to recreate the same concepts on modern hardware you would do something like SDF CSG on GPUs, but it would be surprisingly interactive and so missing this surprise element.