ABSTRACT
Seamus Blackley was hired as a program manager to work on a next-generation graphics project called Fahrenheit, which was a collaborative project between Microsoft and Silicon Graphics Incorporated, the original developers of OpenGL. Their plan was to convince Original Equipment Manufacturers to create gaming machines with Microsoft’s certification—a meaningful certification that game developers and makers of 3rd party peripherals like graphics and sound cards would appreciate and support. As a company, Microsoft’s primary focus was on their enterprise software—Windows in particular. Despite the fact that games were among the top activities of consumer Windows users, Microsoft’s philosophy up until that time was to stay out of hardware for the most part and just sell lucrative retail upgrades to Windows and their other software solutions. The logo program seemed the best approach to enhancing games for Windows at the time, but attitudes were about to evolve.
