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A comment on The Book of Shaders. Parent comment

Re:The Book of Shaders by dualogy on Wednesday November 01, 2017 @04:29PM (#15605177)
"Naming things", one of the 2 hard problems in computing. In other words, not worth scratching your head over, ever. "Historical accidents" in terminology just such as this one abound all over the tech world. What you say specifically about "the term shader" has been true at least ever since the first consumer GPU offered a programmable vertex pipeline and their marketers chose the term "vertex shaders". How long ago was that, nearly 2 decades I reckon?

Could've been worse. Since Java was so big back then, too, we're lucky they didn't come up with eg. "Rendlets". At least "shader" is freakin' aesthetic =)

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Re:The Book of Shaders by iainmerrick on Wednesday November 01, 2017 @04:37PM (#15605244)
Not important to your point, but for historical flavor--

I'm pretty sure the term "shader" was introduced by Pixar, from way back before Toy Story when they were doing little demos and short movies. They were building very modern-looking graphics pipelines in software way before the first GPUs (I think Nvidia coined that term?)

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Re:The Book of Shaders by Synaesthesia on Thursday November 02, 2017 @01:13AM (#15608008)
The original nVidia GeForce 256 was termed a “GPU”. It did transform and lighting on the GPU I remember.
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