From Geforce 8800 and Windows 3.11: Take a look at the past
From Geforce 8800 and Windows 3.11 - that happened on November 8th? We take a look back at the young but eventful history of the computer.
... 1993: Microsoft's colorful DOS attachment becomes internet-enabled: On November 8, 1993, Windows for Workgroups 3.11 comes onto the market, an improved version of its predecessor 3.1, which is already network-compatible. The new Windows version contains, among other things, Winsock, a collection of functions that now also allows the control of Hayes modems and access to the Internet via TCP / IP and thus represents an important step in the moderation of its products for Microsoft.
... 2006: Based on the completely newly developed G80 graphics chip, Nvidia presented the new high-end graphics cards Geforce 8800 GTX and GTS on November 8, 2006. For the first time, the GPUs offer DX10 and thus Shader Model 4 support and, to the surprise of many skeptics, are turning away from the previous Geforce tradition and relying on a real unified shader architecture. The 8800 GTX with its 128 shaders ALUs and 768 MiByte graphics memory runs at 575 MHz core clock, the shaders with more than double (1,350 MHz) and puts all other available GPUs in the shade in almost all benchmarks. Even the second fastest model, the Geforce 8800 GTS with 640 MiByte, would have been enough.
Nvidia is also launching new chipsets to go with the new graphics chips, the 600i series for Intel platforms consists of the 680i SLI, 650i SLI, and 650i Ultra models - but while the chipsets never achieve the importance of previous generations and a few years later Nvidia stops the chipset business, G80-based chips remain extremely popular three years later.
By: Olivia J.
