Open GL History

Could anyone help me with this:I have tried to find a summary of Open GL’s history from the very begging until now e.g the first version was this it required this(from hardware view). The next version was… it had these changes from the previous etc. until the latest.I have tried for some time to find this out but what i got was something really complicated.Any clue where could i find a complete story or even better could someone post it here for me?Thanx

Look here for the specs.
http://www.opengl.org/documentation/spec.html

OpenGL 1.0 had some flaws like missing texbinds but these were actually commonly supported as extensions long before OpenGL 1.1. This is often the case with OpenGL, many of the later specs encompass earlier extensions with hardware supporting the extensions before the spec was out.

Of historical interest is IrisGL, the precursor to OpenGL. In some ways it had stuff that OpenGL 1.0 never did, but threw the odd baby out with the bathwater when OpenGL was spec’d. Texbinds being the prime example.
http://www.4crawler.com/IrisVision/Docs/IrisGL.shtml

OpenGL 1.0 (and especially 1.1) was very functional since IrisGL had been evolving for years on some of the best graphics hardware in the world. Stencil buffers, accumulation buffers and a lots of interesting things that are considered advanced Direct3D features were around even in OpenGL 1.0.

As for Hardware requirements, impelementations could always fall back on software for spec support and some implementations did. So it’s not clear that there were really ever any strict hardware requirements, only implementation requirements.

[This message has been edited by dorbie (edited 01-16-2004).]