Not sure about Pixar's involvement.
The Genesis of OpenGL varies depending on who you ask. People inside SGI say
that OpenGL was driven by customer demand. Their users wanted to see IrisGL
deployed on non-SGI platforms. SGI tried this with a fee hardware vendors,
but the support was spotty, different vendors supported IrisGL in different
ways, and the same app did not run the same way across platforms. So SGI
came up with OpenGL and designed it in such a way that anyone could support
it well.
However, if you talk to anyone in the PHIGS/PEX camp during the late
80s/early 90s, they'll tell you that SGI was feeling threatened by the
widespread adoption of PHIGS/PEX, and decided to turn IrisGL into an open
standard ("OpenGL") in order to kill off PHIGS/PEX.
PEX was an open standard adopted by just about anyone with X Windows on
their box, but SGI had not been invited to join the PEX consortium. So there
was some animosity there.
Paul Martz
Skew Matrix Software LLC
http://www.skew-matrix.com <http://www.skew-matrix.com/>
+1 303 859 9466
_____
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Raphael
Sebbe
Sent: Saturday, April 04, 2009 3:28 AM
To: OpenSceneGraph Users
Subject: Re: [osg-users] SGI declares bankruptcy (UNCLASSIFIED)
Jumping in...
Well, I would definitely be interested in getting more history background
about the original design of the OpenGL API. There was a collaboration
between Pixar and SGI in the late 80s, probably around the same time that
both IrisGL and the Renderman specification emerged. Pixar had been working
on this for some time, yet, I am unsure of how the whole process of OpenGL
(IrisGL) happened. Did Pixar propose the Renderman specification to SGI,
which then proposed a real-time api inspired on that? Or did SGI develop
this all internally and by chance came to some similar design?
Raphael
On Fri, Apr 3, 2009 at 10:42 PM, Paul Martz <[email protected]> wrote:
As the British punk band The Stranglers used to say, "Everybody loves you
when you're dead."
Sure, SGI did some things pretty well, but let us not forget they also did
some things pretty poorly, and in my opinion were really not much better or
worse than many other hardware vendors.
Things they did well: OpenGL 1.0 was a masterpiece of design that took the
graphics world by storm and utterly crushed several other competing APIs of
the era. This is an API that is so well-accepted that it has outlived its
creator.
Things they didn't do well: Too much focus on the high end. Bad business
decisions. No focus on open standards until absolutely forced to do so. Not
able to keep pace with the industry (look where they are now).
And marketing faux pas... When OpenGL 1.0 first came out, SGI marketing
constantly repeated the notion that immediate mode was the most important
thing in the world. (This was a direct slam against the PHIGS/PEX APIs,
which were focused on retained mode.) At the same time, SGI was promoting
their 1.1 million triangles/second hardware. However, all their demos had a
performance HUD that clearly showed significantly less than 1.1m tris/sec.
When pressed on this, they eventually published a benchmark that
demonstrated 1.1m tris/sec, but it used display lists. Oops.
Paul Martz
Skew Matrix Software LLC
http://www.skew-matrix.com
+1 303 859 9466
_______________________________________________
osg-users mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
_______________________________________________
osg-users mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
