02/06/2023 at 00:01 by Carsten Spille and others – The emergence of the Playstation and the Geforce 4 – that happened on February 6th. Every day, PC Games Hardware takes a look back at the young but eventful history of the computer.
…1959: This invention was presented the previous year, but it was not until February 6, 1959 that Jack Kilby from Texas Instruments received the patent for the integrated circuit. Without this development, which became the basis of the microprocessor, modern computer technology would be unthinkable.
…1991: Most game consoles use bulky plug-in modules as carrier media, but the chips they contain are expensive and only offer very small storage capacities. The industry agrees that the future belongs to the CD-ROM drive, which after all allows several hundred megabytes to be stored on a single optical medium. Sega is already working on the Mega CD, a CD extension for the Mega Drive, and Nintendo also recognizes the trend: on February 6, 1991, Sony and Nintendo jointly announce that they will develop such a drive for Nintendo’s Super NES console. But nothing came of the business, the drive never came onto the market, Sony and Nintendo went their separate ways again – and Sony decided to go it alone with the leftovers from this project: the Playstation.
…2002: Nvidia dominates the graphics chip market and strengthens this position on February 6, 2002 with a new GPU generation, the Geforce 4. While the Geforce 4 Ti aka NV25 is a further development of the DirectX 8 chip Geforce 3, the Mid-range version Geforce 4 MX (NV17) on the older Geforce 2 design – so it has to do without DX8 functions, which confuses customers and brings a lot of criticism to Nvidia. Nevertheless, the fourth Geforce generation is a success: the Ti-4600 model conquers the top of most benchmarks, the Ti-4200 delivers a lot of performance at a moderate price.
