The First Modern Computer and DirectX 6 (PCGH-Retro 07 Aug)

…1944: It is a time of war – but at the same time it is the beginning of the computer age: In the 1940s, the first fully digital computers are developed in the USA, Germany and Great Britain. On August 7, 1944, IBM formally shipped the ASCC (Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator) to Harvard University, also known as “Harvard Mark I”; there it is initially used in the physics laboratory. The Mark I is one of the first digital computers that is Turing-capable and – with punch cards – programmable, it also works largely automatically and is unusually reliable for that time. However, unlike later calculators, it did not use the binary system, but the decimal system, and it also did not work entirely electronically. Nevertheless: For many, the ASCC is the first “modern” computer in history.

…1998: The previous DirectX generations were only of limited use as the basis for modern 3D games, Microsoft replaced each version too quickly with a successor, and the support for 3D graphics cards was too incomplete. Programmers have to manually optimize their games for many different graphics interfaces, some even still rely on DOS. Things look better with DirectX 6.0, which was released on August 7, 1998 for Windows 95 and 98: The Direct3D component, which is important for games, uses the capabilities of current cards such as 3dfx Voodoo 2, Matrox G400, Ati Rage 128 or Nvidia Riva TNT/TNT2 and for the first time supports multi-texturing and environment mapped bump mapping (EMBM). More and more developers are turning away from proprietary interfaces such as 3dfx Glide or the open standard OpenGL and instead use DirectX 6 – Windows is finally establishing itself as a gaming platform.

Interesting links about DirectX:
• DirectX – from the beginnings to the present (I)
• DirectX – from the beginning to the present (II)
• DirectX – from the beginning to the present (III)