Mark Kilgard
Encyclopedia
Mark J. Kilgard is a graphics software engineer
Software engineer
A software engineer is an engineer who applies the principles of software engineering to the design, development, testing, and evaluation of the software and systems that make computers or anything containing software, such as computer chips, work.- Overview :...

 working at Nvidia
NVIDIA
Nvidia is an American global technology company based in Santa Clara, California. Nvidia is best known for its graphics processors . Nvidia and chief rival AMD Graphics Techonologies have dominated the high performance GPU market, pushing other manufacturers to smaller, niche roles...

.

Prior to joining Nvidia, Mark Kilgard worked at Compaq
Compaq
Compaq Computer Corporation is a personal computer company founded in 1982. Once the largest supplier of personal computing systems in the world, Compaq existed as an independent corporation until 2002, when it was acquired for US$25 billion by Hewlett-Packard....

 and Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics, Inc. was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark...

. While at Silicon Graphics, he authored the OpenGL Utility Toolkit
OpenGL Utility Toolkit
The OpenGL Utility Toolkit is a library of utilities for OpenGL programs, which primarily perform system-level I/O with the host operating system. Functions performed include window definition, window control, and monitoring of keyboard and mouse input...

, better known as GLUT, to make it easy to write OpenGL-based 3D examples and demos. The primary reason for this was the lack of a windowing and input API with OpenGL using GLX.
Mark Kilgard wrote and released many OpenGL technical sample programs during the pushback against Microsoft's
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 competitive FUD
Fear, uncertainty and doubt
Fear, uncertainty and doubt, frequently abbreviated as FUD, is a tactic used in sales, marketing, public relations, politics and propaganda....

 against the API, and his GLUT toolkit (ported to Windows by Nate Robins) allowed these examples to run cross platform on Windows PC systems as well as SGI workstations.

At Nvidia, Mark Kilgard has helped design important parts of 3D graphics APIs. He has written key whitepapers, including "Cg in Two Pages".

Kilgard graduated from Rice University
Rice University
William Marsh Rice University, commonly referred to as Rice University or Rice, is a private research university located on a heavily wooded campus in Houston, Texas, United States...

. He has written two books: OpenGL for the X Window System (1996), and The Cg Tutorial (2003), co-authored with Randima Fernando.
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