also there was no programmable shaders back then and the fixed pipeline was a very reasonable abstraction for the hardware at the time. https://www.khronos.org

also there was no programmable shaders back then and the fixed pipeline was a very reasonable abstraction for the hardware at the time. https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/Fixed_Function_Pipeline https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/Fixed_Function_Pipeline