Then I bought a 3DFx Voodoo card and started using Glide and it was night and day. I had something up the first day and every day thereafter it seemed to get more and more capable. That was a lot of fun.
In my opinion, Direct X was what killed it most. OpenGL was well supported on the Voodoo cards and Microsoft was determined to kill anyone using OpenGL (which they didn't control) to program games if they could. After about 5 years (Direct X 7 or 8) it had reached feature parity but long before that the "co marketing" dollars Microsoft used to enforce their monopoly had done most of the work.
Sigh.
I was acutely aware of the various 3D API issues during this time and this rings very true.
> By 1999 it was clear that Microsoft had no intention of delivering Low Level; although officially working on it, almost no resources were dedicated to actually producing code.
No kidding...
Also the CEO of SGI in the late 90s was an ex-Microsoft and bet heavily on weird technical choices (remember the SGI 320 / 540? I do) that played no small role in sinking the boat. Extremely similar to the infamous Nokia suicide in the 2010s under another Microsoft alumni. I think the similarity isn't due to chance.
My current employer has fairly recently hired a ton of ex-Google/Microsoft into upper management. They’re universally clueless about our business, spending most of their time trying to shiv one another for power.