I mean, his Stanford work (when he was a professor) was the basis for the series of graphics engines SGI released. It's interesting to think about the Times Before, when people didn't appreciate graphics acceleration or matrix calculations nearly as much as we do today.
What to do was understood as early as the Evans and Sutherland Line Drawing System 1 in the early 1970s, which had 4x4 transform hardware. But the GPU was a cabinet the size of a mainframe CPU. There were a series of mainframe-sized GPUs from E&S. Jim Clark worked for E&S. Affordability was a few decades ahead.
