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Qube Software
Qube Software is a British company specialising in advanced 3D technology. It was founded in 1998 by Servan Keondjian and Doug Rabson who created the Reality Lab renderer and who subsequently played a leading role at Microsoft turning it into Direct3D. Qube Software has produced games, however, its main focus has been the development of 3D software that would address the key problems with 3D middleware Keondjian says he identified during his years working on Reality Lab and Direct3D. History Rabson and Keondjian met in the late 1980s, as employees of the British video games company Magnetic Scrolls. Keondjian subsequently founded RenderMorphics to allow him to follow his interest in 3D technology, an interest he attributes in part to the ground-breaking Elite series of games published in the mid 1980s. RenderMorphics developed and released Reality Lab, a real-time 3D application programming interface (API) aimed at the PC. Its main selling point was predicated on the claim that ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washington, United States. Its best-known software products are the Windows line of operating systems, the Microsoft Office suite, and the Internet Explorer and Edge web browsers. Its flagship hardware products are the Xbox video game consoles and the Microsoft Surface lineup of touchscreen personal computers. Microsoft ranked No. 21 in the 2020 Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations by total revenue; it was the world's largest software maker by revenue as of 2019. It is one of the Big Five American information technology companies, alongside Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Meta. Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen on April 4, 1975, to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800. It rose to do ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Direct3D
Direct3D is a graphics application programming interface (API) for Microsoft Windows. Part of DirectX, Direct3D is used to render three-dimensional graphics in applications where performance is important, such as games. Direct3D uses hardware acceleration if it is available on the graphics card, allowing for hardware acceleration of the entire 3D rendering pipeline or even only partial acceleration. Direct3D exposes the advanced graphics capabilities of 3D graphics hardware, including Z-buffering, W-buffering, stencil buffering, spatial anti-aliasing, alpha blending, color blending, mipmapping, texture blending, clipping, culling, atmospheric effects, perspective-correct texture mapping, programmable HLSL shaders and effects. Integration with other DirectX technologies enables Direct3D to deliver such features as video mapping, hardware 3D rendering in 2D overlay planes, and even sprites, providing the use of 2D and 3D graphics in interactive media ties. Direct3D contains many ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Middleware
Middleware is a type of computer software that provides services to software applications beyond those available from the operating system. It can be described as "software glue". Middleware makes it easier for software developers to implement communication and input/output, so they can focus on the specific purpose of their application. It gained popularity in the 1980s as a solution to the problem of how to link newer applications to older legacy systems, although the term had been in use since 1968. In distributed applications The term is most commonly used for software that enables communication and management of data in distributed applications. An IETF workshop in 2000 defined middleware as "those services found above the transport (i.e. over TCP/IP) layer set of services but below the application environment" (i.e. below application-level APIs). In this more specific sense ''middleware'' can be described as the dash ("-") in '' client-server'', or the ''-to-'' in ''peer ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reality Lab
Reality Lab was a 3D computer graphics API created by RenderMorphics to provide a standardized interface for writing games. It was one of the main contenders in the realtime 3D middleware marketplace at the time, alongside Criterion Software's RenderWare and Argonaut Software's BRender. Reality Lab was a scene graph API providing real-time rendering that would run with acceptable performance on graphics cards or the host computer's CPU. After a short time on the market, RenderMorphics was purchased by Microsoft in February 1995 and Reality Lab formed the basis for Direct3D. Microsoft's acquisition statement of RenderMorphics contained a description of Reality Lab:"RenderMorphics' flagship product, Reality Lab(TM), provides high-performance 3-D graphics technology for a variety of personal computer-based games and multimedia applications. Reality Lab has been acclaimed by a wide range of developers, including Autodesk, Creative Labs, Kaleida Labs and Virgin Entertainment."Architect ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Magnetic Scrolls
Magnetic Scrolls was a British video game developer active between 1984 and 1990. A pioneer of audiovisually elaborate text adventure games, it was one of the two largest and most acclaimed interactive fiction developers of the 1980s. ''Magnetic Scrolls'' was one of the first game developers to use graphics and animation in its text adventure games, which set it apart from other companies in the genre. The company's games were known for their complex puzzles, intricate storylines, and immersive gameplay. Some of the most popular games developed by Magnetic Scrolls include The Pawn, The Guild of Thieves, and Jinxter. History Formation Formed by Anita Sinclair, Ken Gordon and Hugh Steers in 1984, London-based Magnetic Scrolls initially dabbled with development on the Sinclair QL home computer before deciding to take advantage of the emerging Atari ST and Amiga gaming platforms. Having secured a publication deal with Rainbird, a British software label owned by Telecomsoft, they b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
RenderMorphics
Reality Lab was a 3D computer graphics API created by RenderMorphics to provide a standardized interface for writing games. It was one of the main contenders in the realtime 3D middleware marketplace at the time, alongside Criterion Software's RenderWare and Argonaut Software's BRender. Reality Lab was a scene graph API providing real-time rendering that would run with acceptable performance on graphics cards or the host computer's CPU. After a short time on the market, RenderMorphics was purchased by Microsoft in February 1995 and Reality Lab formed the basis for Direct3D. Microsoft's acquisition statement of RenderMorphics contained a description of Reality Lab:"RenderMorphics' flagship product, Reality Lab(TM), provides high-performance 3-D graphics technology for a variety of personal computer-based games and multimedia applications. Reality Lab has been acclaimed by a wide range of developers, including Autodesk, Creative Labs, Kaleida Labs and Virgin Entertainment."Architectu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for servers, and Windows IoT for embedded systems. Defunct Windows families include Windows 9x, Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone. The first version of Windows was released on November 20, 1985, as a graphical operating system shell for MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Windows is the most popular desktop operating system in the world, with 75% market share , according to StatCounter. However, Windows is not the most used operating system when including both mobile and desktop OSes, due to Android's massive growth. , the most recent version of Windows is Windows 11 for consumer PCs and tablets, Windows 11 Enterprise for corporations, and Windows Server 2022 for servers. Genealogy By marketing ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Windows 95
Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufacturing on July 14, 1995, and generally to retail on August 24, 1995, almost three months after the release of Windows NT 3.51. Windows 95 merged Microsoft's formerly separate MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows products, and featured significant improvements over its predecessor, most notably in the graphical user interface (GUI) and in its simplified "plug-and-play" features. There were also major changes made to the core components of the operating system, such as moving from a mainly cooperatively multitasked 16-bit architecture to a 32-bit preemptive multitasking architecture, at least when running only 32-bit protected mode applications. Accompanied by an extensive marketing campaign, Windows 95 introduced numerous functions and features that w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
DirectX
Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct", such as Direct3D, DirectDraw, DirectMusic, DirectPlay, DirectSound, and so forth. The name ''DirectX'' was coined as a shorthand term for all of these APIs (the ''X'' standing in for the particular API names) and soon became the name of the collection. When Microsoft later set out to develop a gaming console, the ''X'' was used as the basis of the name Xbox to indicate that the console was based on DirectX technology. The ''X'' initial has been carried forward in the naming of APIs designed for the Xbox such as XInput and the Cross-platform Audio Creation Tool (XACT), while the DirectX pattern has been continued for Windows APIs such as Direct2D and DirectWrite. Direct3D (the 3D graphics API within DirectX) is widely used in the develop ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
FreeBSD
FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular open-source BSD operating system, accounting for more than three-quarters of all installed and permissively licensed BSD systems. FreeBSD has similarities with Linux, with two major differences in scope and licensing: FreeBSD maintains a complete system, i.e. the project delivers a kernel, device drivers, userland utilities, and documentation, as opposed to Linux only delivering a kernel and drivers, and relying on third-parties for system software; FreeBSD source code is generally released under a permissive BSD license, as opposed to the copyleft GPL used by Linux. The FreeBSD project includes a security team overseeing all software shipped in the base distribution. A wide range of additional third-party applications may be installe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lego
Lego ( , ; stylized as LEGO) is a line of plastic construction toys that are manufactured by The Lego Group, a privately held company based in Billund, Denmark. The company's flagship product, Lego, consists of variously colored interlocking plastic bricks accompanying an array of gears, figurines called minifigures, and various other parts. Lego pieces can be assembled and connected in many ways to construct objects, including vehicles, buildings, and working robots. Anything constructed can be taken apart again, and the pieces reused to make new things. The Lego Group began manufacturing the interlocking toy bricks in 1949. Movies, games, competitions and eight Legoland amusement parks have been developed under the brand. , 600 billion Lego parts had been produced. History The Lego Group began in the workshop of Ole Kirk Christiansen (1891–1958), a carpenter from Billund, Denmark, who began making wooden toys in 1932. In 1934, his company came to be called ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Personal Computer
A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or technician. Unlike large, costly minicomputers and mainframes, time-sharing by many people at the same time is not used with personal computers. Primarily in the late 1970s and 1980s, the term home computer was also used. Institutional or corporate computer owners in the 1960s had to write their own programs to do any useful work with the machines. While personal computer users may develop their own applications, usually these systems run commercial software, free-of-charge software ("freeware"), which is most often proprietary, or free and open-source software, which is provided in "ready-to-run", or binary, form. Software for personal computers is typically developed and distributed independently from the hardware or operating system ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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