www.bizapedia.com/DatoDr/directx.php -
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Published on: 8/8/2004
Last Visited: 1/25/2008
Three Microsoft employees,Craig Eisler, Alex St. John, and Eric Engstrom,were concerned, because programmers tended to see Microsoft's previous operating system, DOS, as a better platform for game programming, meaning few games would be developed for Windows 95 and the operating system would not be as much of a success.
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Eisler, St. John, and Engstrom conspired together to fix this problem, with a solution that they eventually named DirectX.
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The development of DirectX was led by the team of Eisler (development lead), St. John (evangelist), and Engstrom (program manager).
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Direct3D (introduced by Eisler, Engstrom, and St. John as an alternative to SGI's OpenGL) was intended to be a lightweight partner to OpenGL for game use.