[dahart]

You're probably right, but nobody I know calls it "Whitted ray tracing" unless Turner is there in the room, or some point is being made about or in reference to his paper specifically. ;) In my experience, graphics people generally do mean producing colors for pixels when they say "ray tracing". But I think physicists would assume "ray tracing" means visibility queries and nothing more.

When someone says 'ray tracing' to me today, before they elaborate on what they mean, I assume they're talking about using straight line segment visibility tests probably to make some kind of picture, probably using Monte Carlo techniques, probably for global illumination. So, they might mean path tracing, or one of the (many) other ways to simulate lighting, or my assumption might be wrong, but that's okay because language is fun, and vague, overridden and imperfect terms allow us to have longer conversations. :)