The Development of 3D Controllers

Abstract

The first graphics controllers were modified oscilloscope or vector scope controllers, made with vacuum tubes. In the 1980s, the suppliers of workstations, graphics terminals, and PCs were building their own graphics controllers based on commercially available integrated circuits in 1981 IBM introduced the PC with a basic AIB called the Color Graphics Adaptor. Matrox Electronics was the first company to build a graphics board for a Micro or Home computer The first company to offer a “AIB” with a bit-mapped programmable display was Hercules. in the early 1990s the PC market was expanding and was an open chaotic wild west environment. Games were always a part of computers, minicomputers, microcomputers, and PCs. Between the hardware and the application is the application program (API) driver. As new hardware entered the market, such as display controllers, the hardware manufacturer had to write the driver in order to be compatible with the existing applications and OS. Often that meant writing a translator that converted the manufacturer’s new hardware’s instructions to look like and behave like a prior piece of equipment. During the 1990s there was the API wars, ended by Microsoft forcing its Direct × API on the industry. Independent Open GL was introduced in 2000 and is still used for professional graphics.

The graphics controller is the image generator and the heart of the display system.

Appendix

6.1.1 Technical Terms

API	Application Programming Interface
BLT	bit-block transfer
CPU	Central Processing Unit
CTM	Close-To-Metal
CUDA	Compute Unified Device Architecture
GPU	Graphics Processing Unit
HW T&L	Hardware Transform and Lighting
IRIS GL	Integrated Raster Imaging System Graphics Library
MS-DOS	Microsoft Disk Operating System
PhysX	Nvidia GPU accelerated game physics
PPU	Physics Processing Unit
OpenGL	Open Graphics Library
OpenCL	Open Computing Language
RAM	Random Access Memory
Shader	Fundamental execution unit of a GPU
X86	Common instruction set architecture

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) was the logical outgrowth of increasing interest in computers as evidenced by several events, including a January 1947 symposium at Harvard University on large-scale digital calculating machinery; the six-meeting series in 1946–1947 on digital and analog computing machinery conducted by the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers; and the six-meeting series in March and April 1947, on electronic computing machinery conducted by the Department of Electrical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In January 1948, the word “Eastern” was dropped from the name of the Association. In September 1949, a constitution was instituted by membership approval.