Timeline

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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 programs; nevertheless, it does not prevent the invention of backpropagation by a Finnish master's student in 1970.
  • 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.
  • 1981: Weitek, designer of the Nvidia VGA cores, is founded, initially to develop floating-point units and other accelerator chips.
  • 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).
  • 1982: Priem is hired at a company called Vermont Microsystems, Inc. to develop graphics hardware in collaboration with IBM.[1]
  • 1982: SGS-Thomson Microelectronics is founded from the merger of the French state-owned semiconductor company SGS and the Italian Thomson Microelectronics.
  • 1984: The approximate birth date of Mark Harris (founder of GPGPU.org), based on his university records.
  • Early-Mid 1980s: Chris Malachowsky is hired to work on the HP 1000 line of computers while finishing his master's degree from Santa lara University.
  • 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 join AMD as an engineer.
  • 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, alongside two other programmers, one of whom now works at NVIDIA.
  • 1984: Priem leaves Vermont Microsystems and moves to a company called GenRad, one of the largest manufacturers of electronic testing equipment at the time; however, unbeknowst to Priem, the company is in financial distress and suffering from poor management.
  • 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 brace.[2]
  • 1985: One of Huang's coworkers convinces him to leave AMD and work for LSI Logic, then one of the most cutting-edge silicon design and fabrication companies, instead.[3]. He is later assigned to the Sun Microsystems account, where he meets Priem and Malachowsky.[4]
  • 1985: Lori Mills is hired at SGI.[5]
  • 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: Priem leaves GenRad and, due to his reputation as the designer of the IBM PGC, is shortly after hired at Sun Microsystems, to work on their next-generation graphics architecture alongside Chris Malachowsky.
  • ~1986: Vermont Microsystems releases the IM-1024, the successor to the PGC. It swaps out 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. It does not appear Priem was involved, as he left around the time of the completion of the PGC.
  • 1986-1987: Chris Malachowsky is hired by Sun after finishing his master's degree, after considering both moving to the UK division of HP in Bristol and various other US-based tech companies, including Evans and Sutherland.
  • October 1987: IBM releases the catchily named 8514/A, the first fixed-function PC graphics accelerator. It is later copied by many companies including ATi and S3 Graphics, becoming the basis of many early 1990s PC graphics accelerators.
  • January 21, 1988: Curtis Priem produces several documents about the "CG6" architecture, which later became his second graphics card design, the Sun GX.[6] [7]
  • 1988: Programmer's Hierarchical Interactive Graphics System (PHIGS), an early 3D graphics standard, is released; it is adopted by many companies.
  • 1989: The Sun GX (possibly codenamed "CG6"), a primarily quadliateral based 2D/3D graphics card, is released as an option for Sun's line of workstations, designed by Priem. Priem and another Sun employee, Bruce Factor, releases a flight simulator, Aviator, for GX-based Sun workstations and continue to release updates for the next few years, eventually commercialising the program. Later on, Sun bundled the GX with various Sun-3 and SPARCstation workstations[8]. The manufacturing was handled by LSI Logic and hense Jensen Huang, as he was the person in charge of the Sun account.[9]. A PHIGS implementation is provided.

1990-1992

  • 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.
  • ~1990: After the success of the GX project, Huang is allowed by the founder and CEO of LSI Logic, Wolf Corrigan, to create a division that would sell SoCs combining multiple funcitons onto one chip.[10]
  • 1991: Lori Mills leaves SGI to raise her and Jensen's two children. This seriously stretches their personal finances despite Jensen holding a secure and well paying job. Malachowsky's wife did a similar thing; later, Malachowsky conceded that both him and Huang's wives were "superior engineers" to them.
  • Early 1990s: Due to the massively accelerating pace and performance of PCs, running texture mapped 3D games with a reasonable level of quality becomes an increasingly plausible and cheap option. By 1997, over 70 companies are founded to attempt to exploit this market. One of these attempts is made by Malachowsky and Priem, who proposed to Sun that they enter into the gaming graphics business - the proposal is rejected.[11]. [12]. Apparently, the dysfunctional work environment of Sun got so bad that he would regularly start crying in the various recreation areas of Sun's campus[13]
  • 1992: SGI cleans up and renames IRIS GL (its graphics library) to OpenGL, turning it over to the OpenGL Architecture Review Board (ARB; later handed to Khronos Group in 2006) and releasing it as an open graphics API standard.
  • Late 1992: After the failure of their proposal, and after SGI also turned down the idea of entering the consumer 3D graphics sapce, Malachowsky and Priem contact Huang to discuss the concept of founding a 3D graphics company; one version of this proposal, before Huang was involved, involved building a chip for the Korean chaebol Samsung. After he got involved in the project, Huang was assigned as the CEO of this hypothetical company due to his larger amount of business experience; additionally, the trio's coworkers at SUn were skeptical of Malachowsky and Priem's ability to work together, considering they often broke out into screaming matches against each other. After some time and many meetings in various seedy Denny's restaurants, Jensen accepts after determining that it was possible to make at least $50 million of revenue from the venture[14].
  • December 31, 1992: Curtis Priem resigns from Sun Microsystems to jumpstart the new venture (the families of Malachowsky and Huang were demanding that they wait until the other resigned). Several Sun employees follow him despite the high risk and lack of any funding due to his reputation as the founder of the GX.[15]

NV1 era: 1993-1995

  • Early 1993: The founders of Nvidia stop going to the Denny's where they were discussing the founding of Nvidia due to an outbreak of gang warfare near the restaurant leading to the windows being shot through.[16]. Later on, a plaque was inserted to commemorate the founding of Nvidia allegedly occurring within it, although in reality it was simply discussed there and formally founded inside Priem's townhouse.
  • February 17, 1993: Jensen Huang resigns from LSI Logic after spending six weeks transferring his projects to other managers within the company.[17]
  • Early March 1993: Chris Malachowsky, after an attempt by his manager to convince him to move to work on the project that later became Java fails, resigns from Sun to join Nvidia. His manager let them take and upgrade their personal workstations at Sun for Nvidia's use.
  • April 5, 1993: NVidia, Inc. is formally founded in Curtis Priem's townhouse with a $200 initial capitalisation. The equity is initially split equally between the three founders. The name is a pun on "New Venture" and also the "GX next version" project that Priem and Malachowsky initially proposed to Sun; Huang forced them to rename it to NV1 to prevent any possible copyright issues with their former employers. The first headquarters of the company were two of the three bedrooms of Priem's house; an impromptu bedroom was set up in the garage.[18]. Early employees included David Rosenthal (who had mvoed to the US from Britain at this point).
  • April 8, 1993: Curtis Priem changes the description of his SPARCstation 1 UUCP server to read "Nvidia"[19]
  • Mid 1993: Nvidia, despite a bad pitch involving a commodity PC being hacked to use a Sun GX, receives $4 million in seed funding from Sutter Hill Ventures and Sequoia Capital, mostly due to the founders' reputation.S Mhortly after this, the company rented office space in Sunnyvale, California. [20]
  • October 20, 1993: Version 1.0 of the "NV Architecture Specification" document is produced; it is an overview of the architecture of the graphics accelerators that Nvidia intends to build.[21]
  • November 1993: Pellucid is taken over by another company called Media Vision to develop sound cards and 2D/3D graphics products.
  • November 10, 1993: Nvidia signs an agreement with SGS-Thomson Microelectronics to develop a graphics accelerator which will be fabricated by SGS and jointly marketed by Nvidia and SGS.[22]. The chip will be branded NV1 and split into two variants; a mid-range 64-bit bus DRAM variant ("NV1-D64") and a high-end 32-bit bus variant using VRAM memory ("NV1-V32"). SGS paid Nvidia $500,000 in return for the rights to market the D64 variant only and brand it as the STG-2000; SGS also provided the RAMDAC and legacy VGA support for the NV1 (becoming the STG-1732/1764 chips) and deployed certain engineers to assist Nvidia with the NV1.
  • November 19, 1993: According to code comments, development of the NVidia Hardware Simulator (NV0) and a dummy Resource Manager to simulate an Nvidia device under Windows 3.1 had started by this time.
  • Early 1994: Several Media Vision employees, many of which had been around since the days of the IrisVision at SGI, leave out of frustration at the company's seeming unwillingness to pursue 3D graphics and create 3D/fx Interactive, Inc. (later shortened to 3Dfx) Initially it intended to build a motherboard but its funder, Gordon Campbell, requested an add-on card to be produced as well as arcade machines; the company was incorporated on February 24, 1994.
  • May 17, 1994: The CEO of Media Vision, Paul Jain resigns due to the exposure of massive amounts of financial fraud by the company. The company enters into bankruptcy proceedings, shuts down its graphics business and is reorganised as Aureal Semiconductor. Jain is indicted, but never convicted, of 27 counts of various fraud charges by the US Department of Justice, although both him and the CFO of the company are eventually fined.
  • Mid-1994: An initial version of the NV1 design is completed and revision A01 of the NV1 is taped out and sent to ST. A VHS tape exists of the chips being returned to Nvidia, but it is not available. Nvidia was paid $1 million for the milestone under the terms of the Strategic Collaboration Agreement.[23]
  • July 15, 1994: Driver development for a real Software#Resource Manager running, presumably, under a real NV1 chip, had started by this time.
  • July 26, 1994: Nvidia reports some details of their architecture to the Jon Peddle Report, who had advised Huang not to found Nvidia.[24]. The company is also mentioned in the 25 July 1994 issue of InfoWorld.
  • August 1, 1994: Under the terms of the Strategic Collaboration Agreement, Nvidia was paid another $500,000 by SGS-Thomson.[25]
  • November 1, 1994: Another $500,000 payment to Nvidia was made.[26]
  • ~Late 1994: Revision A02 of the NV1, presumably fixing bugs with earlier revisions, is taped out,.
  • January 4, 1995: An Nvidia employee helps a Usenet user find Video for Windows 1.1d and the Indeo 3.2 codec[27]
  • January 11, 1995: An Nvidia employee inquires about printing off a large number of CD-Rs ("initially 20, then 100, then a large number"). Possibly this means that the NV1 SDK was first released shortly after this time.[28]
  • January 16, 1995: By this point, some kind of website existed at https://nvidia.com.
  • January-April 1995: An nvidia employee posts many times about use of the FrameMaker software for writing program help; presumably documentation of the NV1 ar
  • May 23, 1995: The NV1 is officially announced via a press release on Nvidia's website and various SGS-Thomson marketing activities.
  • May 1995: The NV2 project is started by Nvidia and Sega.[29]
  • June 1995: By this point, revision B01 of the NV1, including performance improvements for bilinear filtering, the NV1 DRM engine and various errata fixes, has been produced.
  • June 15, 1995: Version 0.4 of the "Programming NV" document is produced.
  • November 23, 1995: The NV1 is released.

Notes

References

  1. ↑ The Nvidia Way (Kae, Tim; 2024), pp. 25. ISBN 9781324086710).
  2. ↑ The Thinking Machine (Witt, Stephen; 2025), pp. 26. ISBN 9780593832691
  3. ↑ The Thinking Machine (Witt, Stephen; 2025), pp. 29. ISBN 9780593832691
  4. ↑ The Nvidia Way (Kae, Tim; 2024), pp. 22. ISBN 9781324086710).
  5. ↑ The Thinking Machine (Witt, Stephen; 2025), pp. 30. ISBN 9780593832691
  6. ↑ Sun GX TEC Reference (Priem, Curtis; 21 January 1988) http://www.bitsavers.org/components/lsiLogic/sparc/GX/Sun_GX_TEC_Jan1988.pdf)
  7. ↑ Sun GX FBC Reference (Priem, Curtis; 21 January 1988) http://www.bitsavers.org/components/lsiLogic/sparc/GX/Sun_GX_FBC_Jan1988.pdf
  8. ↑ https://old.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploads/hc_archives/hc01/3_Tue/HC1.S8/HC1.8.2.pdf
  9. ↑ The Nvidia Way (Kae, Tim; 2024), pp. 32. ISBN 9781324086710).
  10. ↑ The Thinking Machine (Witt, Stephen; 2025), pp. 33. ISBN 9780593832691
  11. ↑ The Thinking Machine (Witt, Stephen; 2025), pp. 35. ISBN 9780593832691
  12. ↑ The Nvidia Way (Kae, Tim; 2024), pp. 22. ISBN 9781324086710).
  13. ↑ The Nvidia Way (Kae, Tim; 2024), pp. 37. ISBN 9781324086710).
  14. ↑ The Thinking Machine (Witt, Stephen; 2025), pp. 41. ISBN 9780593832691
  15. ↑ The Nvidia Way (Kae, Tim; 2024), pp. 40. ISBN 9781324086710).
  16. ↑ The Thinking Machine (Witt, Stephen; 2025), pp. 41. ISBN 9780593832691
  17. ↑ The Nvidia Way (Kae, Tim; 2024), pp. 42. ISBN 9781324086710).
  18. ↑ The Thinking Machine (Witt, Stephen; 2025), pp. 43. ISBN 9780593832691
  19. ↑ UUCP Mapping Project: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.mail.maps/c/QmEyGC73D_c/m/34dhQKz4ZOYJ
  20. ↑ The Nvidia Way (Kae, Tim; 2024), pp. 53. ISBN 9781324086710).
  21. ↑ SGS-Thomson/Nvidia Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SEC filing), including 1996 and 1998 amendments. Available online at https://contracts.onecle.com/nvidia/sgs.collab.1993.11.10.shtml)
  22. ↑ SGS-Thomson/Nvidia Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SEC filing), including 1996 and 1998 amendments. Available online at https://contracts.onecle.com/nvidia/sgs.collab.1993.11.10.shtml)
  23. ↑ SGS-Thomson/Nvidia Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SEC filing), including 1996 and 1998 amendments. Available online at https://contracts.onecle.com/nvidia/sgs.collab.1993.11.10.shtml)
  24. ↑ Nvidia's Quadratic Processor: The NV1 (available online at https://www.computer.org/publications/tech-news/chasing-pixels/nvidias-quadratic-processor-the-nv1)
  25. ↑ SGS-Thomson/Nvidia Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SEC filing), including 1996 and 1998 amendments. Available online at https://contracts.onecle.com/nvidia/sgs.collab.1993.11.10.shtml)
  26. ↑ SGS-Thomson/Nvidia Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SEC filing), including 1996 and 1998 amendments. Available online at https://contracts.onecle.com/nvidia/sgs.collab.1993.11.10.shtml)
  27. ↑ "Info Request"; USENET comp.graphics; https://groups.google.com/g/comp.graphics/c/MZcpuy751l8/m/5fHqF3jUJUEJ
  28. ↑ "RECORDABLE CD--R advice sought; S.Page; USENET alt.cdrom; https://groups.google.com/g/comp.graphics/c/MZcpuy751l8/m/5fHqF3jUJUEJ)
  29. ↑ NVIDIA Notes to Financial Statements; SEC Form S1/A; available online at https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1045810/0001012870-98-001519.txt
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