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Virtual Hostage Swap (5/14/98)
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Speaking of the Knife, his latest bit of info really piques our interest. It would appear that Apple has arranged for a little trade with SGI, those wacky purveyors of Unix workstations who have a pretty nice grip on the high-end graphics industry. SGI happens to be the company behind OpenGL, a nice set of 3D programming API's that are rapidly becoming an industry standard, unlike Apple's own Quickdraw 3D, which isn't catching on anywhere outside of the Mac world. Heck, as far as Quickdraw 3D is concerned, even support within the Mac world is sort of sparse.
So what would SGI want from Apple in return for access to OpenGL for Mac OS/Rhapsody? How about Quicktime? Now there's an Apple technology that is rapidly becoming a standard outside of the Mac world; Quicktime 3 for Windows is reportedly doing well, and ISO has selected Quicktime as the starting point for the MPEG-4 specification. Quicktime currently doesn't run on Unix, but if SGI and Apple make their little trade, that may change.
Everybody wins! SGI gets Quicktime running on their workstations, as well as the furthering of their own OpenGL standard by Apple embracing it on the Mac platform. Apple gains a great set of 3D API's which will lead to some excellent modeling and game software (Quake 2, for instance, won't be ported until the Mac OS/Rhapsody supports OpenGL), and Quicktime gets a boost by gaining marketshare on a new platform. Let's hope this all comes off smoothly.
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 5/14/98 episode: May 14, 1998: Microsoft and the U.S. government lay down their arms and try to reach a peaceful settlement. Meanwhile, MacWEEK goes chasing after Wintel money, and Apple pursues that splefty set of 3D API's known as OpenGL...
Other scenes from that episode: 703: Standoff at Sundown (5/14/98) Oooooh, can'tcha just feel the dramatic tension? On the eve of the scheduled ship date of Windows 98 to manufacturers, the other shoe has finally dropped; Windows 98 is officially going to be late, if only for even just a day... 704: Graft and Scandal (5/14/98) Another one bites the dust. MacWEEK, the only major weekly Macintosh-centric publication, has announced that in August, it's changing its name to EMedia Weekly and will begin to cover Windows and Unix systems as well as Macs (even more so than now, we assume)...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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