Old School Monday: The DirectX Files
Old School Monday: The DirectX Files
Posted 08/09/2010 at 5:58pm
| by The Maximum PC Staff
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To accompany our yearly Dream Machine feature last week, we went digging through our archive of old issues to find some old stories to put this year’s rig in perspective. We found the original Dream Machine, some great statistics, and some shockingly accurate predictions. But what we really discovered was that there’s some really fascinating stuff in the old issues of Maximum PC. They’re ripe with reviews of long-forgotten tech, crazy interviews with major tech players, and some of the cheesiest ads in history, and we’ve decided to start bringing it all to you, every week.
So welcome to Old School Monday, where we’ll share some of the fun stuff we find in our oldest issues (and if you were wondering, Maximum PC was called "boot" in those first few years). This week, we’ve got a 1997 article by games industry legend Alex St. John describing the early history of DirectX—a technology that 14 years and 11 versions have proven to be in it for the long-haul. Though it seems like a constant now, DirectX was still a young technology in 1997, and this article provides an interesting perspective on the graphics API.
In addition to a lot about DirectX, read on for the truth about Microsoft’s hostage situation, their 2 million dollar H.R.Giger UFO, and a comic strip about Bill Gates.
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someuid
August 23, 2010 at 11:29am
It was being a fly on the wall at Microsoft. What ever happened to Alex St. John?
pfjaco
August 17, 2010 at 1:55pm
Boy can I remember that issue and all the hub bub the OGL V/S D3D "war" had brewing seems like it was yesterday .
JonPhillips
August 10, 2010 at 7:10am
I can still remember editing that story. Alex turned it in, and then went incommunicado, more or less... which is what a recently departed MS product envangelist, insanely rich with stock-option cash, will do. The editing required about two weeks of chasing down other sources, trying to corroborate what Alex had written. It was a very hardcore techie story on the surface, but I would have liked to have published more material actually about DirectX. It was also one of the worst selling issues that year. Alex was a big deal among a very small group of people, and unknown to the world at large. Still, running this as a cover story DID probably help cement our status among the harddest of the hardcore enthusiasts, and that may be as important a motivation as anything.
nmanguy
August 09, 2010 at 10:41pm
I just wonder if 10 years from now, when I'm reading the latest headlines and the newest Old School Monday pops up, if it will have the Dream Machine 2010 article, and whether I'll chuckle and say "Only 12 cores? LCD? BIOS? Drivers?"
Michael Ellis
August 16, 2010 at 7:44pm
Hopefully it will be more like electron based computers? How quaint!
Keith E. Whisman
August 09, 2010 at 9:03pm
I remember DirectX Beta... LOL.. that was a long time ago. It doesn't seem all that long ago though. I just went to New Student Orientation at my college and there are a lot of students in college now that were just babies when DirectX was new. God I'm old.
Nailer669
August 10, 2010 at 5:33am
Yes.... that scares me. Back when I was that age, you had to know how to use DOS and how to modify your autoexec.bat and config.sys files. HIMEM.SYS and EMM386. Hell.... I had to have a boot menu to enable and disable those just to play Tie Fighter!
Things have come so far that kids these days don't know jack about anything. Trying to get a college kid to troubleshoot something is like trying to get a rock to baby sit a 3 year old.... it just sits there.... worthless. Punk-ass kids... Yeah.... I feel old now.
aerotive
August 09, 2010 at 8:48pm
God, remember when burner speed mattered? Or for that matter, optical drives themselves.
PS Captchas suck.
lunchbox73
August 10, 2010 at 6:17am
24X?!? That's crazy fast! I gotta have one but they cost $300. :)
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