Renegades of the Empire
The "Beastie Boys" did whatever it took to make their revolution happen.... St. John's disregard for Microsoft authority figures was equaled only by the game developers' antipathy for the big Redmond company. No one knew how far he might go until his boss put him in charge of a presentation to the trade press. St. John emerged on stage at the Microsoft theater and told the trade-press writers: "Yep, I know what you guys think about Windows." He booted up a computer. The blue start-up screen with clouds and Windows 3.1 logo came to life on a large display. A graphic of a shotgun barrel rose from the bottom of the screen. With the audience looking down its sights, the gun blasted five holes in the logo. The press erupted with laughter and approving applause. Microsoft's senior marketing vice president turned crimson and told St. John's boss, Rick Segal, "You gotta fire this guy." Segal set the marketing guy straight. "I looked him right in the face and, said, 'You don't have a clue. They think you're a slime bag and now they think he's a hero.' "Competing in the high-tech computer market is a lot like war--especially if you work at Microsoft. Bill Gates's gladiators--his engineers and evangelists and programmers--were famous for seizing new terrain, converting nonbelievers, and always winning, no matter what the cost. No one took the lessons of the Microsoft way more to heart than Craig Eisler, Eric Engstrom, and Alex St.
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- You'd probably enjoy the book "Renegades of the Empire" by Drummond.
https://www.amazon.com/Renegades-Empire-Software-Revolution-...
- I recall (albeit vaguely) reading an interesting book "Renegades of the Empire: How Three Software Warriors Started a Revolution Behind the Walls of Fortress" by Michael Drummond.
My recollection of the genesis of DirectX was in fact a skunkworks project create their vision of the next generation web-browsing experience. I think it was demoed and they had begun touting to developers/publishers with work with, but was axed.
I think it had a 3D aspect to it -- perhaps all 3d, I can't recall. But my memory was that they needed a significant 3D library, and they didn't want to go down the OpenGL (I think it was fundamentally political and personality disagreements with themselves and the maintainer(s) of the OpenGL implementation within MS) They convinced their boss to acquire a company that had a 3d engine product and hacked together a more comprehensive library, that ultimately became DirectX.
- I thought Renegades of the Empire was a fascinating look into the internal machinations at Redmond and a bit of DirectX history too
https://www.amazon.com/Renegades-Empire-Software-Revolution-...
- Renegades of the Empire: How Three Software Warriors Started a Revolution Behind the Walls of Fortress Microsoft
TL;DR: the history of WinG and DirectX
The Wikipedia entry is also worth checking out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinG
- I don't know. If a historical account gives the details it knows correctly but leaves a bunch of details out is it still accurate?
There's actually a great book written about the creation of Direct3D called Renegades of the Empire (http://tinyurl.com/3n4jnru).
Having read that book I can tell you this account, while accurate in its technical details, misses a lot of other issues that were going on. For Instance...
1. The team pursuing OpenGL was part of the Windows NT group (back when NT and '95 were two different products). The Direct3D team was part of the consumer Windows group. So Microsoft's support (or lack thereof) for OpenGL games was largely based on an internal issue. With Microsoft dragging its feet on implementation in consumer Windows it forced a lot of developers to move.
2. On that note Microsoft's Consumer Windows group was all about moving developers to Windows and making Windows the defacto game standard (and as a result killing off other platforms like Mac, OS/2, etc...). Both the Mac and OS/2 supported OpenGL while they couldn't support Direct3D
3. Direct3D benefited from other parts of the DirectX API. DirectSound, for example, made it very easy for developers to support Aureal's 3d sound technology while still being backwards compatible. DirectInput made it easy to support things like ForceFeedback joysticks. And so on...
4. Microsoft bribed Developers (They did, read the book)
So while the technical analysis is correct here OpenGL's fall was due more to a powerful company doing everything it could to kill the technology off.
- As a complement, Chris Hecker has kept some of his notes regarding OpenGL vs. Direct3D around:
It seemed quite important at the time that he- who begat WinG, which begat DirectX, some of which is covered in Renegades of the Empire, which someone else mentioned, which is certainly worth reading- went on to agitate for OpenGL over Direct3D. Now there's kind of a scrapheap of history vibe off of the whole thing.
