Timeline

This is a timeline of the early history of Nvidia.

1950s and earlier

• 1948: David S. H. Rosenthal (one of the NV1 designers) is born.
• March 6, 1950: John Nickolls is born.
• 1958 or 1959: Curtis Priem is born. For some reason, his exact birth year is not known.
• May 2, 1959: Chris Malachowsky is born.
• 1959: The revolutionary Sketchpad program is created on the MIT TX-2 computer by a team led by Ivan Sutherland (later of Evans and Sutherland). It allowed the drawing of objects using a light pen and was one of the first entirely graphical programs and a pioneer of human-computer interaction as a concept.

1960s

• 1960: David Kirk (Nvidia's chief scientist from 1997 until 2009) is born.
• February 17, 1962: Jensen Huang is born in Taiwan.
• 1958-1962: The "perceptron" concept (the predecessor to modern artificial neural networks) is explored by Frank Rosenblatt.
• 1964: The first 3D computer art is created, a three-dimensional hand.
• 1967: Jensen Huang's family moves to Thailand.
• 1969: Evans and Sutherland, Inc. releases the LDS-1 (Line Drawing System-1), the first commercial 3D graphics system.
• 1969: An extremely influential book on perceptrons by AI researchers Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert causes serious damage to the reputation of the perceptron concept and ends serious research into them for the next twenty years. This is despite the book acknowleging the strengths and setting out to be an overall evaluation of perceptrons rather than a debunking of their efficacy; this may be due to the small size and generally close-knit AI community of the time. However, even if this book had never been published, neural networks capable of serious learning ability were not plausible even on supercomputers until the 1990s, due to the very high resource use of these program.
• 1969: The Special Interest Group in Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH) is founded by the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery). It becomes one of the most prominent conferences for discussion of, and research into, computer graphics as a field.

1970s

• 1973: Jensen Huang is sent to the United States by his parents. They believed they were sending him to a prestigious private school, but they actually sent him to the Oneida Baptist Institute, a reform school for troubled children in Kentucky
• 1975: Huang's family move to the United States and he relocates to Oregon to live with them.
• 1977: Approximate birth date of Ian Buck (one of the inventors of GPGPU) based on his university records.
• 1978: Jensen Huang gets a job at Denny's as a dishwasher, eventually promoted to a busboy and then a waiter, to supplant his income while he studies at university. This era of his life later becomes a large part of his mythology, and the Denny's restaurants of Silicon Valley became a general hangout spot in later years. He was also apparently a nationally ranked table tennis player during this time.

1980s

• 1980: As a part of a research project led by ex-E&S employee Jim Clark. the first integrated circuit specifically intended for 3D geometry processing is created, the Geometry Engine.
• 1980: Jensen Huang starts a course in electrical engineering at Oregon State University.
• August 12, 1981: IBM announces its Personal Computer, using an Intel CPU and Microsoft-supplied (via Seattle Computer Products) operating system. This is the start of the modern PC "Wintel" standard architecture and the products that Nvidia's add-on boards would be available for.
• 1982: SiliconGraphics Computer Systems, Inc. is founded.
• 1982: Microsoft starts working on an implementation of the obscure Graphical Kernel System (GKS) standard for device-independent graphics called GDI (Graphics Device Interface.)
• 1982: Possibly after seeing a demonstration of the "Visi On" preemptive OS for the PC, Microsoft merges the GDI with another project, Interface Manager, a standard interface library for Microsoft's apps division, to create the "Microsoft Window Manager" project, later renamed Microsoft Desktop and then simply to Windows. The project slowly becomes an almost complete operating system (except for disk I/O and filesystem services, which are still provided by MS-DOS).
• Early 1980s: Priem is hired at a company called Vermont Microsystems, Inc. to develop graphics hardware in collaboration with IBM.
• 1984: The approximate birth date of Mark Harris (founder of GPGPU.org), based on his university records.
• 1984: Jensen Huang graduates alongside his future wife Lori Mills. He interviews at Texas Instruments, AMD and LSI Logic; he receives offers from the latter two and elects to work at AMD.
• 1984: The "IRIS 1000" terminal and workstation line is released by SGI at a mid-five figure cost; it is one of the most powerful graphics workstations of its era and the start of SGI's rise to cultural prominence.
• August 14, 1984: IBM announces its third-generation (or second depending on how the XT gets counted) PC - the Advanced Technology (PC/AT). One of the graphics options is the Professional Graphics Controller, a CGA-compatible three-board coprocessor with an 8Mhz 8088 that can do up to 640x480 at an 8bpp bit depth (256 colours), and provides a ROM to perform 2D and 3D graphics calculations via both assembly and a human-readable command set, including very advanced font rendering for the time. This was designed by Vermont Microsystems; Curtis Priem's name is included in the ROM.^[1]

• December 1984: Jensen Huang and Lori Mills (a day after his proposal to her) almost die in a car crash in the Oregon mountains. He twisted his neck, requiring stitches and a neck brce.
• 1986: Pixar is founded; its first serious work, the "Luxo Jr." animated spot, shown at SIGGRAPH in 1986, is one of the first 3D animated short films to be considered credible by the animation industry.
• 1986: The Texas Instruments Graphics Architecture (TIGA) line of 2D GPUs is released for the PC; it is one of the earliest attempts at proper PC graphics but fails due to the lack of a standardised operating system to write drivers for.
• ~1986: Vermont Microsystems releases the IM-1024, the successor to the PGC. It replaces the 8Mhz 8088 for a 10Mhz 80186 (much faster due to much more efficient operation) and allows up to 1024x768x8bpp rendering; this was delivered via a Windows 1.03 driver.

1990-1993

• 1990: SGI releases the IrisVision, a 3D GPU for the PC capable of flat and Gouraud shading. Only around 5,000 units are sold due to the exorbitantly high cost, and SGI eventually spins off the team responsible for it into another company called Pellucid.
• 1992: SGI cleans up and renames IRIS GL (its graphics library) to OpenGL, releasing it as an open graphics API standard.

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Notes

^ Although this is not officially confirmed, many of the names on the ROM report working at Vermont Microsystems during the time where the PGC would be being developed and released on their LinkedIn accoounts. Additionally, another Vermont Microsystems product has a very similar command set to the PGC while coming out before it.