Remember 3Dlabs?

3Dlabs was a cool little UK-based company. It was founded in 1994 when Osman Kent left DuPont Pixel, but I came to it in 2000 when it absorbed Intense3D, a spinoff from Intergraph.

Quick-and-dirty WebGL imitation of our old “glsldemo” app.

For the most part, I was located at the Colorado office, working on a small piece of the world’s first GLSL compiler.

Our office was on the second floor in Fort Collins Old Town Square.

I loved my job: the location, the innovative things we were doing, and the bright people. I spent a few weeks at the UK mothership, and have very fond memories of that trip.

I also worked for 3Dlabs in their Alabama office on the driver team, where I fixed bugs in C and microcode. I’m thankful that my career started so close to the metal, even though I didn’t appreciate it at the time. It had a lasting positive influence on the way I approach software development.

Software is not a platform. The hardware is the platform. (Mike Acton)

Philip Rideout
December 2015