
A Primer for PHIGS (1991) - deepaksurti
http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acd/literature/books/phigs/contents.htm
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kragen
It's not hard to see from the first couple of chapters why DEC PHIGS and PEX
were routed by GL. I mean, the main factor was that Jim Clark took a VLSI
design class from Carver Mead and Lynn Conway, doing a 3-D accelerator, and
founded SGI with it in 1982:
[https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/Impact/FundingaRevol...](https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/Impact/FundingaRevolution.html)

But really, Fortran for examples? In a 1989 book?

~~~
mwfunk
It wouldn't surprise me if most people using PHIGS/PEX in 1989 were doing
visualization for scientific computing on workstations, and any UI or graphics
was an afterthought compared to the number crunching code that was generating
the data to visualize. If so, they were probably using Fortran, and there's
probably lots of people doing that sort of work in Fortran even now.

Not that I would recommend using Fortran for anything, just providing context.
Even Numerical Recipes didn't get a C version until 1988. The original edition
from 1985 was Fortran and Pascal. So even Pascal was considered a more
mainstream language for this sort of work than C, at that time.

~~~
kragen
That's a good point. Even Matlab and IDL didn't have the widespread reach of
Fortran for that kind of thing until later.

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neonate
This page explains what it is: [http://www.chilton-
computing.org.uk/acd/literature/books/phi...](http://www.chilton-
computing.org.uk/acd/literature/books/phigs/overview.htm)

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pjmlp
Still used it at the university, it was quite enjoyable somehow.

