[dahart]

I could broadly agree with your first two sentences, even though it's not actually true that ray tracing didn't have global illumination before the Rendering Equation came along. Recursive ray tracing, diffuse inter-reflections, distribution ray tracing, all these things existed before the term path tracing came along. Path tracing is more of a unifying formalism than a distinction between global illumination and direct lighting.

I'm completely stumped by your last sentence though, I have no idea where your anger is coming from. But it fails to explain why you want to make the distinction in this thread, since, as I already pointed out "Ray Tracing in one Weekend" is doing both (for example chapters 1-7 are the mechanics of ray tracing, no path tracing concepts are used until chapter 8). Are you referring indirectly to any specific products that have marketing you don't like? Your story can't explain people who use the term "ray tracing" since they're being honest about not necessarily doing path tracing. So are you talking about someone who uses the term "path tracing" when they're not doing global illumination?