Three-dimensional computer graphics date back to the 1960s and 1970s. Work by pioneers such as James Blinn and Edwin Catmull paved the way for many of today’s innovations. But computer graphics didn’t become ubiquitous until the home computer revolution in the 1980s and 1990s. During the 1980s, writing cross-platform software was incredibly difficult, especially for games. Every computer and video-gaming system had its own proprietary hardware and software drivers. Every time you wanted to release your software on a new device, you had to write device-specific drivers, software, and user interfaces. This work was repetitive and felt largely unnecessary. In 1981, the company Silicon Graphics (SGI) was founded. It manufactured high-performance 3D workstations. Like all other manufacturers of 3D workstations, it had its own proprietary 3D graphics API called IRIS GL. It dominated the market for much of the 1980s, but by the early 1990s, its market share had eroded. In 1992, in an attempt to prevent further erosion of market share, it opened the IRIS GL API and renamed it OpenGL. OpenGL didn’t take off as the de facto 3D graphics API until 1997. The video-game company idSoftware, led by lead programmer John Carmack, developed a follow-up to its best-selling video game, Doom. It was called Quake. Every game platform was eager to have a port of Quake added to its platform. Carmack didn’t want to have to write unique drivers for every variation of hardware and OS on the market, so he chose OpenGL as a standard. He told the manufacturers that if they didn’t support OpenGL, they could not port Quake to their platform. The manufacturers complied and wrote drivers to support OpenGL. Since every manufacturer had done the work to support OpenGL, many game developers began to exclusively support OpenGL because they knew it would work on every platform. Voila! An industry standard was born.
CodeDumpInMind
Three-dimensional computer graphics date back to the 1960s and 1970s. Work by pioneers such as James Blinn and Edwin Catmull paved the way for many of today’s innovations. But computer graphics didn’t become ubiquitous until the home computer revolution in the 1980s and 1990s.
During the 1980s, writing cross-platform software was incredibly difficult, especially for games. Every computer and video-gaming system had its own proprietary hardware and software drivers. Every time you wanted to release your software on a new device, you had to write device-specific drivers, software, and user interfaces. This work was repetitive and felt largely unnecessary.
In 1981, the company Silicon Graphics (SGI) was founded. It manufactured high-performance 3D workstations. Like all other manufacturers of 3D workstations, it had its own proprietary 3D graphics API called IRIS GL. It dominated the market for much of the 1980s, but by the early 1990s, its market share had eroded. In 1992, in an attempt to prevent further erosion of market share, it opened the IRIS GL API and renamed it OpenGL.
OpenGL didn’t take off as the de facto 3D graphics API until 1997. The video-game company idSoftware, led by lead programmer John Carmack, developed a follow-up to its best-selling video game, Doom. It was called Quake. Every game platform was eager to have a port of Quake added to its platform. Carmack didn’t want to have to write unique drivers for every variation of hardware and OS on the market, so he chose OpenGL as a standard. He told the manufacturers that if they didn’t support OpenGL, they could not port Quake to their platform. The manufacturers complied and wrote drivers to support OpenGL. Since every manufacturer had done the work to support OpenGL, many game developers began to exclusively support OpenGL because they knew it would work on every platform. Voila! An industry standard was born.
1 year ago | [YT] | 2