IRIS GL

In 1982, SGI began development of IRIS GL. It soon became much more popular than the ANSI standard PHIGS, as developers considered it more intuitive and flexible. In the years after 1982, IRIS GL began licensing it to many companies, including IBM. Fragmentation soon became an issue with IRIS GL's popularity, in the implementations and a much bigger one with many different windowing systems. In 1985, the X window system came around, and finally there was a somewhat common system. The system was considered more transparent and reliable. In June 1992, the OpenGL 1.0 specification was released, with as much portability as possible. Unlike PEX, OpenGL did not rely on the window system, it being a completely separate part to ensure their previous goals were met. To avoid namespace conflicts, every function was prefixed with "gl". Many modules were also either cleaned up, removed, or renamed. == Overview ==

IRIS GL was a graphics library for the IRIX workstations. Window creation and input were built in. It provided special routines for handling 3D graphics, allowing the user to specify a 3D transformation, and then having it automatically be applied with every vertex passed in. Due to the lack of programmable shaders, shading was specified with many parameters including diffuse, specular, ambient, and emission. There existed routines like rect that allowed a programmer to specify vertices from a more high-level perspective. The GL also had basic typesetting support using raster fonts, and also support for NURBS curves ==See also==