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Consider that this work started in 1991 and OpenGL wasn’t a thing outside of SGI until 1992.
by goatinaboat 7y ago
Consider that this work started in 1991 and OpenGL wasn’t a thing outside of SGI until 1992.
- pjmlp 7y agoConsider that we were already doing GPGPU like programming (in concept at least) on the Amiga with DMA and Agnus in 1987. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_Agnus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_Agnus And before miniGL came to be, we already had Glide on the PC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glide_(API) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glide_(API) Had it not been for miniGL and Carmacks advocacy for OpenGL, it wouldn't have been much of a thing outside SGI.
- goatinaboat 7y agoI still have my Amiga! SGI started with their proprietary IrisGL and that became OpenGL at the behest of other Unix vendors at the time.
- pjmlp 7y agoOpenGL would have been better if that role had been taken by Iris Inventor.[0] Instead it became a rite of passage for every OpenGL beginner to reimplement Inventor on their own way, either from scratch or playing Tetris with different kinds of libraries. Meanwhile, other graphical SDKs always provided such APIs. By the way, the best 3D API back then was Renderman, the genesis for modern shading languages. https://www.amazon.com/RenderMan-Companion-Programmers-Realistic-Computer/dp/0201508680 https://www.amazon.com/RenderMan-Companion-Programmers-Reali... [0] Yes there was Open Inventor afterwards, but its story is a bit convoluted.