The first mass email for advertising purposes is sent, 3D Labs announces the P10 VPU and Nvidia allows benchmarks of the Geforce GTX 690 – that happened on May 3rd. Every day, PC Games Hardware takes a look back at the young but eventful history of the computer.
…1978: A marketing employee of the former computer manufacturer DEC sent an e-mail to 393 users of the Arpanet (precursor to today’s Internet) 30 years ago. This action is still considered the root of all evil today. Gary Thuerk, then an employee of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC – now part of HP), certainly had no idea what course his advertising campaign would take on today’s Internet. On May 3, 1978, he sent an advertising email to almost every user on the west coast of the USA in what was then rather manageable Arpanet. You can see a collection of the reactions from back then here Find.
Since then, spam has not only spread over the Internet. Dubious advertising also finds its way via mobile telephones, fax machines, websites, and even the home landline telephone is no longer immune to it.
There is no end in sight either. Bill Gates had in 2004 announced, that the world should be spam-free by 2006. Nothing of the sort has happened, instead spam now accounts for up to 90 percent of email traffic on the Internet. We therefore do not congratulate on this dubious anniversary.
…2002: The graphics chip manufacturer 3D Labs, traditionally based in the workstation market, announces the P10, a largely freely configurable and programmable graphics chip, which the company markets as a VPU, i.e. visual processing unit. The chip that will later be used on the Wildcat cards of the VP series brings with it the first configurability between maximum geometry and pixel performance (via driver reset). The up to 200 SIMD units (individual “lanes”) can be partially redistributed between pixel and triangle work – a concept that will be demanded in dynamic form four years later with the DirectX 10 generation.
Geforce GTX 690 – almost 1,000 US dollars for the benchmark king.
Source: Nvidia
…2012: After already before few days the specifications, the design as well as some benchmarks for Nvidia’s dual GPU card Geforce GTX 690, which the manufacturer itself has been allowed to publish, now follows the rest of the Schützenfest and cement what was already clear: with the power of two Kepler GK104 graphics chips the GTX 690 easily sits at the top of all performance bar charts.
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