In 1988, Silicon Graphics introduced the MIPS-based workstation computer, the Personal IRIS series. A few years later, IBM licensed both the graphics subsystem and the IRIS Graphics LibraryAPI for their RS/6000 POWERstation line of POWER1-based workstations. IrisVision was an unintended offshoot of SGI's attempts to port the subsystem to IBM's Micro Channel Architecture. They found it was much easier to debug the prototype implementations on an IBM PS/2. To quote R.C. Brown:
Specification
Not unlike its Personal IRIS variant, IrisVision was capable of handling 8-bit and 24-bit raster images with a 24-bit Z buffer. The difference lay in that all this was integrated with a fifth generation Geometry Engine without having to upgrade the cards themselves. Around the same time, SGI was preparing to introduce the next series of graphics cards for their IRIS Indigo workstations, called "Express Graphics", which came in two variants for the Personal IRIS: Turbo Graphix and the Elan Graphics pipeline, both of them an evolution of IrisVision. It came packaged with a proprietary 32-bitC compiler in order to take advantage of the 80386 and 80486's 32-bit extensions. The PharLap 32-bit DOS-Extender was also packaged to further enable the use of large amounts of memory. Due to the nature of the pipeline, all execution calls to IRIS GL were displayed in fullscreen.
The forgotten 3D revolution
3D graphics hardware was a relatively new prospect for microcomputers at the time, and was unknown in the IBM personal computing world. 3D graphics software was mostly associated with PowerAnimator and Softimage or niche applications on the Amiga 3000, such as Video Toaster and Lightwave, or the Macintosh Quadra, such as StrataVision, and 3D graphics hardware was frequently associated with UNIX machines. In contrast, in the IBM personal computing world, VGA was just barely coming into the spotlight when IrisVision came out on the market. IrisVision presented an alternative few had ever imagined on the Intel platform: that of a 3D platform that used MS-DOS as the base operating system. AutoDesk quickly realized that they could capitalize on this graphics subsystem and released their most successful CAD and 3D production products with support for this card, among them AutoCAD and 3D studio 2 through 4. Eventually support for Microsoft Windows would be developed but without much ado as hardly any software on the GUI system would take advantage of the card. Despite all this, IrisVision fell into relative obscurity, as IRIS GL hadn't reached its pinnacle as the de facto 3D API then was PHIGS, and few people had any real idea of what to do with 3D graphics. Another attempt to port SGI hardware to the PC platform would not occur until the introduction of the SGI Visual Workstation.
