Interview With Initiator of DirectX

Miguel de Icaza writes "There's a great interview from Shacknews with Alex St. John, one of the earlier DirectX / gaming guys. He talks about almost losing his job going against Bill Gates, and talks a bit about the MS development & political process. 'You know why the X on the Xbox is a glowing green X? The original codename for Direct X was the Manhattan Project, because strategically it was an effort to displace Japanese game consoles with PCs and ultimately the Xbox. We called it the Manhattan Project because that was the codename for the program developing the nuclear bomb. We had a glowing radiation logo for the prototype for Direct X, and of course as soon as that got out and the press covered it, it caused a scandal.'"

Comments

Codenames

[ESOB]

The original XBox had the codename of Midway. Midway was the battle in the Pacific that essentially guaranteed that Japan could not invade the US. The US sunk all of Japan's main carriers and then started pushing back the Japanese all other fronts. So I guess naming things after the defeat of Japan in WWII is common practice within Microsoft HQ.