History.

Founding and early years.

On 25 July 1961, Clive Sinclair founded his first company, Sinclair Radionics Ltd. in Cambridge. The company developed hi-fi products, radios, calculators and scientific instruments. When it became clear that Radionics was failing, Sinclair took steps to ensure that he would be able to continue to pursue his commercial goals. In February 1975, he changed the name of Ablesdeal Ltd (a shelf company he had bought in September 1973 for just such an eventuality) to Westminster Mail Order Ltd. The name was changed to Sinclair Instrument Ltd in August 1975.  Finding it inconvenient to share control after the National Enterprise Board became involved in Radionics in 1976, Sinclair encouraged Chris Curry to leave Radionics, which he had worked for since 1966, and get Sinclair Instrument operational. The company's first product was a watch-like Wrist Calculator.

Development of the ZX80.

In July 1977, Sinclair Instrument Ltd was renamed Science of Cambridge Ltd. Around the same time, Ian Williamson showed Chris Curry a prototype microcomputer based on a National Semiconductor SC/MP microprocessor and parts from a Sinclair calculator. Curry was impressed and encouraged Sinclair to adopt it as a product. In June 1978, Science of Cambridge launched its MK14 microcomputer in kit form.  In May 1979, Jim Westwood, Sinclair's chief engineer, designed a new microcomputer based on the Zilog Z80 microprocessor. Sinclair Instrument Ltd introduced the computer as the ZX80 in February 1980, as both a kit and ready-built.  In November 1979, Science of Cambridge Ltd was renamed Sinclair Computers Ltd.

Commercial success and home computers.

In March 1981, Sinclair Computers was renamed Sinclair Research Ltd and the Sinclair ZX81 was launched. In February 1982, Timex Corporation obtained a license to manufacture and market Sinclair's computers in the USA under the name Timex Sinclair. In April the ZX Spectrum was launched. In July Timex launched the TS 1000 (a version of the ZX81) in the United States. In March 1982 Sinclair Research Ltd made an £8.55m profit on turnover of £27.17m, including a £383,000 government grant to develop a flat screen.  In 1982 Clive Sinclair converted the Barker & Wadsworth mineral water bottling factory at 25 Willis Road, Cambridge, into the company's new headquarters. (Following Sinclair's financial troubles, the premises were sold to Cambridgeshire County Council in December 1985.)  In January 1983 the ZX Spectrum personal computer was presented at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show. In September the Sinclair TV80 pocket television was launched, but was a commercial failure.  In 1983 the company bought Milton Hall in the village of Milton, Cambridgeshire, for £2m, establishing its "MetaLab" research and development facility there.  In late 1983 Timex decided to pull out of the Timex Sinclair venture which, due to strong competition, had failed to break into the United States market. However, Timex computers continued to be produced for several years in other countries. Timex Portugal launched improved versions, the TS 2048 and 2068; that company also developed and launched the FDD3000, a floppy disk system, although it was not well received by the market.

Mid-1980s developments.

The Sinclair QL was announced on 12 January 1984, shortly before the Apple Macintosh went on sale. The QL was nowhere near as successful as Sinclair's earlier computers. It suffered from several design flaws,<ref name="QL News / SinclairWatch"></ref> and "Your Sinclair" noted that it was "difficult to find a good word for Sinclair Research in the computer press".  Fully working QLs were not available until late summer and complaints against Sinclair regarding delays were upheld by the Advertising Standards Authority in May of that year. (In 1982 it had upheld complaints about delays in shipping Spectrums.) Especially severe were allegations that Sinclair was cashing cheques months before machines were shipped. In the autumn Sinclair was still publicly predicting it would be a "million seller", and that 250,000 would be sold by the end of the year. QL production was suspended in February 1985, and the price was halved by the end of the year.<ref name="Timex/Sinclair history"></ref>  The ZX Spectrum+, a repackaged ZX Spectrum with a QL-like keyboard, was launched in October 1984 and appeared in WHSmith's shops the day after release. Retailers stocked the machine in large numbers in expectation of good Christmas sales. However, the machine did not sell as well as expected and, because retailers still had unsold stock, Sinclair's income from orders dipped alarmingly in January. The Spectrum+ had the same technical specifications as the original Spectrum. An enhanced model, the ZX Spectrum 128, was launched in Spain in September 1985, with development funded by the Spanish distributor Investronica. The UK launch of this was delayed until January 1986, because retailers had large unsold stocks of the previous model.  At the January 1985 Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show, Sinclair re-entered the United States market, announcing the "FM Wristwatch Radio", an LCD wristwatch with a radio attached. However, the watch had several problems and never went into full production.  Sinclair had long had an interest in electric vehicles, and during the early 1980s he worked on the design of a single-seater "personal vehicle", eventually starting a company called Sinclair Vehicles Ltd in March 1983. He launched the Sinclair C5 electric vehicle on 10 January 1985, but it was a commercial disaster, selling only 17,000 units and losing Sinclair £7,000,000. Sinclair Vehicles went into liquidation later the same year. The failure of the C5, combined with those of the QL and the TV80, caused investors to lose confidence in Sinclair's judgement.

Amstrad acquisition of assets.

On 28 May 1985, Sinclair Research had announced it wanted to raise an extra £10m to £15m to restructure the organisation. Given the loss of confidence in the company, the money proved hard to find. In June 1985, business magnate Robert Maxwell announced a takeover of Sinclair Research, through Hollis Brothers, a subsidiary of his Pergamon Press. However the deal was aborted in August 1985.  The future of Sinclair Research remained uncertain until 7 April 1986, when the company sold its entire computer product range, and the "Sinclair" brand name, to Amstrad for £5 million. The deal did not include the company itself, only its name and products.

Spin-offs.

Sinclair Research was reduced to an R&D business and a holding company, with shareholdings in several new "spin-off" companies formed to exploit technologies developed by the main company. These included Anamartic Ltd (wafer-scale integration), Shaye Communications Ltd (CT2 mobile telephony) and Cambridge Computer Ltd (Z88 portable computer and satellite television receivers).

Return to invention.

Since 1986, the company has continued to exist, but in a completely different form. In 1993, 1994 and 1995 Sinclair made continuing losses on decreasing turnover. Investors became worried that Clive Sinclair himself was using his own personal wealth to fund his inventions. By 1990 the company's entire staff had been reduced to just Sinclair himself, a salesman/administrator, and an R&D employee. By 1997 only Sinclair himself was working at his company.  In 1992, the "Zike" electric bicycle was released, Sinclair's second attempt at changing people's means of transport. It had a maximum speed of, and was only available by mail order. Much like the C5, the "Zike" was a commercial failure, and sold only 2,000 units. In 1999 Sinclair released the world's smallest radio, in the form of the "Z1 Micro AM Radio".  In 2003, the Sinclair "ZA20 Wheelchair Drive Unit" was introduced, designed and manufactured in conjunction with Hong Kong's Daka Designs, a partnership which also led to the SeaDoo Sea Scooter underwater propulsion unit.  July 2006 saw the release of the A-bike, a folding bicycle invented by Sinclair, which was on sale for £200. It had been originally announced two years previously. In November 2010, Sinclair Research announced the X-1 two-wheel electric vehicle, which failed to reach production.  The Wrist Calculator was released by Sinclair Instrument in 1977.  The MK14 (Microcomputer Kit 14) was a computer kit sold by Science of Cambridge of the United Kingdom, first introduced in 1977 for £39.95.  The ZX80 home computer was launched in February 1980 at £79.95 in kit form and £99.95 ready-built. In November of the same year Science of Cambridge was renamed Sinclair Computers Ltd.  The ZX81 (known as the TS 1000 in the United States) was priced at £49.95 in kit form and £69.95 ready-built, by mail order.  The ZX Spectrum was launched on 23 April 1982, priced at £125 for the 16 KB RAM version and £175 for the 48 KB version.  The TV80 was a pocket television. Launched in September 1983. It used a flattened CRT unlike Sinclair's previous portable televisions. The TV80 was a commercial failure selling only 15,000 units and not covering its development costs of £4m.  The Sinclair QL was announced in January 1984, priced at £399. Marketed as a more sophisticated 32-bit microcomputer for professional users, it used a Motorola 68008 processor. Production was delayed by several months, due to unfinished development of hardware and software at the time of the QL's launch. Hardware reliability problems and software bugs resulted in the QL acquiring a poor reputation from which it never really recovered.  The ZX Spectrum+ was a repackaged ZX Spectrum 48K launched in October 1984.  The ZX Spectrum 128, with RAM expanded to 128 kB, a sound chip and other enhancements, was launched in Spain in September 1985 and the UK in January 1986, priced at £179.95.  Sinclair created various peripherals for its computers, including memory expansion modules, the ZX Printer, and the ZX Interface 1 and ZX Interface 2 add-ons for the ZX Spectrum. A number of QL peripherals were developed by other companies but marketed under the Sinclair brand. External storage for the Spectrum was usually on cassette tapes, as was common in that era. Rather than an optional floppy disk drive, Sinclair instead opted to offer its own mass storage system, the ZX Microdrive, a tape-loop cartridge system that proved unreliable. This was also the primary storage device for the QL.  In June 1997 Sinclair Research released the X1 radio for £9.50. This miniature mono FM radio, powered by a CR2032 battery, had a fixed volume and was inserted in the ear. The X1 radio had three buttons, an on/off switch, a "Scan" button, and a "Reset" button to restart the scanning process. It came with a short length of aerial and a detachable ear hook.

Products.

Cancelled projects.

The following computer products were under development at Sinclair Research during the 1980s but never reached production:  Standing for "Low Cost Colour Computer", the "LC3" was developed during 1983 by Martin Brennan and was intended to be a cheap Z80-based games console implemented in two chips, using RAM and (non-volatile) RAM cartridges for storage. A multi-tasking operating system for the "LC3", with a full windowing GUI, was designed by Steve Berry. It was cancelled in November 1983 in favour of the QL. Intended to be a 68008-based home computer, equipped with built-in ZX Microdrive, joystick, RS-232 and ZX Net ports. Sinclair's SuperBASIC programming language was originally intended for this model but was later adopted for the QL. "SuperSpectrum" was cancelled in 1982 after the specification of the "ZX83" (QL) had converged with it. This project is not to be confused with "Loki", which was described as the "SuperSpectrum" in an article in the June 1986 issue of "Sinclair User" magazine. This was to be a portable computer with an integral flat-screen CRT display. Initially to be ZX Spectrum-compatible with a faster Z80 CPU, a built-in ZX Microdrive and a new 512×192-pixel monochrome video mode. Due to the limited size of flat CRT that could be manufactured, a series of folding lenses and mirrors were necessary to magnify the screen image to a usable size. The project was cancelled after the Amstrad take-over, but the "Pandora" concept eventually transformed into the Cambridge Computer Z88. This project was intended to create a greatly enhanced ZX Spectrum, possibly rivalling the Commodore Amiga. "Loki" was to have a 7 MHz Z80H CPU, 128 KiB of RAM, and two custom chips providing much enhanced graphics and audio capabilities. After the Amstrad buy-out in 1986, two engineers who had worked on the project, John Mathieson and Martin Brennan, founded Flare Technology to continue their work. According to Rupert Goodwins, this was a project to produce an add-on floppy disk drive for the ZX Spectrum. This codename was assigned to a QL follow-on project running from 1984 to 1986. Among the features associated with "Tyche" were increased RAM capacity, internal floppy disk drives, the Psion "Xchange" application suite on ROM, and possibly the GEM GUI. This name has been associated with a design concept for a "Super QL" based on wafer-scale integration technology. This was rumoured to be a hypothetical portable version of the QL similar to "Pandora".  In November 2010 Sinclair told "The Guardian" newspaper that he was working on a new prototype electric vehicle, called the X-1, to be launched within a year. "Technology has moved on quite a bit, there are new batteries available and I just rethought the thing. The C5 was OK, but I think we can do a better job now." The two-wheel X-1 was to have been available on July 2011 at the price of £595, but failed to reach production.

Sinclair Research Ltd is a British consumer electronics company founded by Clive Sinclair in Cambridge. It was originally incorporated in 1973 as Westminster Mail Order Ltd, renamed Sinclair Instrument Ltd, then Science of Cambridge Ltd, then Sinclair Computers Ltd, and finally Sinclair Research Ltd. It remained dormant until 1976, when it was activated with the intention of continuing Sinclair's commercial work from his earlier company Sinclair Radionics, and adopted the name Sinclair Research in 1981.

Firma Sinclair Research je výrobce spotřební elektroniky založená Sirem Clivem Sinclairem v Cambridgi v Anglii (původně pod názvem Sinclair Radionics v roce 1961), aby prodávala Hi-Fi výbavu, kalkulátory, radia a jiné výrobky. V roce 1966 Sinclair vyvinul, ale nikdy neuvedl do prodeje, první kapesní televizor na světě. V roce 1972 Sinclair představil Sinclair Executive, kalkulátor významný kvůli svému úzkému designu. Následovalo mnoho dalších variant kapesních kalkulátorů včetně Sinclair Cambridge, Sinclair Scientific a Sinclair Oxford.


Overview.

Implementations of rendering APIs.

Mesa is known as housing implementation of graphic APIs. Historically the main API that Mesa has implemented is OpenGL, along with other Khronos Group related specifications (like OpenVG, OpenGL ES or recently EGL). But Mesa can implement other APIs and indeed it did with Glide (deprecated) and Direct3D 9 (since July 2013.). Mesa is also not specific to Unix-like operating systems: on Windows for example, Mesa provides an OpenGL API over DirectX.  Mesa implements a translation layer between a graphics API such as OpenGL and the graphics hardware drivers in the operating system kernel. The supported version of the different graphic APIs depends on the driver, because each hardware driver has its own implementation (and therefore status). This is specially true for the "classic" drivers, while the Gallium3D drivers share common code that tend to homogenize the supported extensions and versions.  Mesa maintains a support matrix with the status of the current OpenGL conformance visualized at. Mesa 10 complies with OpenGL 3.3, for Intel, AMD/ATI and Nvidia GPU hardware. Mesa 11 was announced with some drivers being OpenGL 4.1 compliant.  Mesa 12 contains OpenGL 4.2 and 4.3 and Intel Vulkan 1.0 support.  Mesa 13 brought Intel support for OpenGL 4.4 and 4.5 (all Features supported for Intel Gen 8+, Radeon GCN, Nvidia (Fermi, Kepler), but no Khronos-Test for 4.5-Label) and experimental AMD Vulkan 1.0 support through the community driver RADV. OpenGL ES 3.2 is possible with Intel Skylake (Gen9).  1st stable version of 2017 is 17.0 (new year Counting). Ready features are certified OpenGL 4.5, OpenGL 4.5 for Intel Haswell, OpenGL 4.3 for NVidia Maxwell and Pascal (GM107+). Huge performance gain was measured with Maxwell 1 (GeForce GTX 750 Ti and more with GM1xx). Maxwell-2-Cards (GeForce GTX 980 and more with GM2xx) are underclocked without NVidia information.  The Khronos CTS test suite for OpenGL 4.4, 4.5 and OpenGL ES 3.0+ is in now (2017-01-24) Open Source and all tests for Mesa 13 and 17 are now possible without costs.  2nd stable version of 2017, 17.1.0, came out on 10 May 2017 with some interesting improvements. OpenGL 4.2+ for Intel Ivy Bridge and OpenGL 3.3+ for Intel Open SWR Rasterizer are 2 of the highlights.  Note that due to the modularized nature of OpenGL, Mesa can actually support extensions from newer versions of OpenGL without claiming full support for such versions. For example, in July 2016, Mesa supported OpenGL ES 3.1 but also all OpenGL ES 3.2 extensions except for five, as well as a number of extensions not part of any OpenGL or OpenGL ES version.  An open question for Mesa and Linux is High Dynamic Range (HDR). Many problems and open points are in pipe for a clean and basic implementation.  3rd Version 17.2 is available since September 2017 with some new OpenGL 4.6 features and velocity improvements in 3D for Intel and AMD. Only 1.4% of Tests fail for OpenGL 4.5 in Nouveau for Kepler.  4th Version 17.3 is ready since December 2017. Many improvements in many drivers are available. OpenGL 4.6 is nearly fully available (Spir-V is not ready). AMD Vulkan Driver RADV is now fully conformant in Khronos-Test.  1st version of 2018 is 18.0 and available since March 2018 by same scheme in 2017. Full OpenGL 4.6 support is not ready, but many features and improvements were successfully tested in RC3. 10-bit support for Intel i965 in Colors is also a Highlight. New is support for Intel Cannon Lake and AMD Vega with actual Linux Version. AMD Evergreen Chips (RV800 or R900) are near OpenGL 4.5 support. Old AMD R600 or RV700 Chips can only support OpenGL 3.3 with some features of OpenGL 4.x. Freedreno is the Driver for Adreno Hardware and near OpenGL 3.3 support.  2nd version of 2018 is 18.1 and available since May. Target is Vulkan 1.1.72 in Intel ANV and AMD RADV driver. OpenGL 4.6 with spir-V is also main target. Permanent work is possible completion of Features and Optimization of drivers for older hardware like AMD R600/Evergreen, Nvidia Tesla and before, Fermi, Kepler or Intel Sandybridge, Ivybridge, Haswell or Broadwell. ARM Architecture made also great improvements in Adreno 3xx/4xx/5xx and Broadwell VC4/VC5 for Raspi with main target OpenGL ES.  3rd version of 2018 is 18.2 and available in calendar stable in September. OpenGL 4.6 with spir-V and Vulkan 1.1.80 are in WIP. The soft Driver for virtual machines VIRGL is ready for OpenGL 4.3 and OpenGL ES 3.2. RadeonSI is also ready for OpenGL ES 3.2. ASTC Texture Compression Support and Compatibility Modus Support for OpenGL 4.4 (3.1 in 18.1) are other highlights in RadeonSI for AMD GCN Cards. New Vulkan 1.1 and more features for Intel and AMD are available. See more Details for Vulkan in Mesamatrix.  4th version of 2018 is 18.3 and released as stable Version 18.3.1 in December 2018. Many features in Detail and support of newer hardware are main parts. Full support of OpenGL 4.6 is not ready.  1st Version of 2019 is 19.0 and was now released at March. Full support of OpenGL 4.6 is not ready, but many improvements on this way are in all drivers.  2nd Version of 2019 is 19.1. Transition of TGSI to NIR is here one main Feature on way to OpenGL 4.6 with Spir-V and more OpenCL. RadeonSI runs well in dev-Version with NIR.  3rd Version of 2019 is 19.2. OpenGL 4.6 is Beta ready for new Intel Iris Driver.  4th Version of 2019 is 19.3. OpenGL 4.6 is ready for Intel i965 and optional for new Iris Driver.  First Version of 2020 is 20.0. Vulkan 1.2 is ready for AMD RADV and Intel ANV. Intel Iris is default for Intel Broadwell Gen 8+. RadeonSI driver switched to using NIR by default, instead of TGSI.  2nd Version of 2020 is 20.1. Many improvements are ready in many drivers. Zink is a new virtual driver.

Vulkan.

The Khronos Group officially announced Vulkan API in March 2015, and officially released Vulkan 1.0 on 16 February 2016. Vulkan breaks compatibility with OpenGL and completely abandons its monolithic state machine concept. The developers of Gallium3D called Vulkan to be something along the lines of Gallium3D 2.0 – Gallium3D separates the code that implements the OpenGL state machine from the code that is specific to the hardware.  As Gallium3D ingests TGSI, Vulkan ingests SPIR-V (Standard Portable Intermediate Representation version "V" as in "Vulkan").  Intel released their implementation of a Vulkan driver for their hardware the day the specification was officially released, but it was only mainlined in April and so became part of Mesa 12.0, released in July 2016. While already the i965 driver wasn't written according to the Gallium3D specifications, for the Vulkan driver it makes even less sense to flange it on top of Gallium3D. Similarly there is no technical reason to flange it with NIR, but yet Intel's employees implemented their Vulkan driver that way.  It is to be expected that AMD's own proprietary Vulkan driver, which was released in March, and was announced to be released as free and open-source software in the future and be mainlined into Mesa, also abandons Gallium3D.  RADV is a free project for AMD and is available since version 13. Conformance with Khronos-Test came in version 17.3. Actual is Full support of Vulkan 1.0 and 1.1 since Mesa 18.1.  Nvidia released their proprietary GeForce driver with Vulkan support at launch day and Imagination Technologies (PowerVR), Qualcomm (Adreno) and ARM (Mali) have done the same or at least announced proprietary Vulkan drivers for Android and other operating systems. But when and whether additional free and open-source Vulkan implementations for these GPUs will show up, remains to be seen.  Mesa Software Driver VIRGL starts Vulkan Development in 2018 with GSOC projects for support of Virtual machines.

Explicit fencing.

A kind of memory barrier that separates one buffer from the rest of the memory is called a fence. Fences are there to ensure that a buffer is not being overwritten before rendering and display operations have completed on it. Implicit fencing is used for synchronization between graphics drivers and the GPU hardware. The fence signals when a buffer is no longer being used by one component so it can be operated on or reused by another. In the past the Linux kernel had an implicit fencing mechanism, where a fence is directly attached to a buffer (cf. GEM handles and FDs), but userspace is unaware of this. Explicit fencing exposes fences to userspace, where userspace gets fences from both the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem and from the GPU. Explicit fencing is required by Vulkan and offers advantages for tracing and debugging.  Linux kernel 4.9 added Android's synchronization framework to mainline.

Generic Buffer Management.

Generic Buffer Management (GBM) is an API that provides a mechanism for allocating buffers for graphics rendering tied to Mesa. GBM is intended to be used as a native platform for EGL on drm or openwfd. The handle it creates can be used to initialize EGL and to create render target buffers.  Mesa GBM is an abstraction of the graphics driver specific buffer management APIs (for instance the various libdrm_* libraries), implemented internally by calling into the Mesa GPU drivers.  For example, the Wayland compositor Weston does its rendering using OpenGL ES 2, which it initializes by calling EGL. Since the server runs on the "bare KMS driver", it uses the EGL DRM platform, which could really be called as the GBM platform, since it relies on the Mesa GBM interface.  At XDC2014, Nvidia employee Andy Ritger proposed to enhance EGL in order to replace GBM.

Implementations of video acceleration APIs.

There are three possible ways to do the calculations necessary for the encoding and decoding of video streams:  For example, Nouveau, which has been developed as part of Mesa, but also includes a Linux kernel component, which is being developed as part of the Linux kernel, supports the PureVideo-branded ASICs and provides access to them through VDPAU and partly through XvMC.  The free radeon driver supports Unified Video Decoder and Video Coding Engine through VDPAU and OpenMAX.  Please note, that V4L2 is a kernel-to-user-space interface for video bit streams delivered by webcams or TV tuners.

Device drivers.

The available free and open-source device drivers for graphic chipsets are "stewarded" by Mesa (because the existing free and open-source implementation of APIs are developed inside of Mesa). Currently there are two frameworks to write graphics drivers: "classic" and Gallium3D. An overview over some (but not all) of the drivers available in Mesa is given at.  There are device drivers for AMD/ATI R100 to R800, Intel, and Nvidia cards with 3D acceleration. Previously drivers existed for the IBM/Toshiba/Sony Cell APU of the PlayStation 3, S3 Virge & Savage chipsets, VIA chipsets, Matrox G200 & G400, and more.  The free and open-source drivers compete with proprietary closed-source drivers. Depending on the availability of hardware documentation and man-power, the free and open-source driver lag behind more or less in supporting 3D acceleration of new hardware. Also, 3D rendering performance was usually significantly slower with some notable exceptions. Today this is still true for Nouveau for most NVIDIA GPUs while on AMDs Radeon GPUs the open driver now mostly matches or exceeds the proprietary driver's performance.

Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI).

At the time 3D graphics cards became more mainstream for PCs, individuals partly supported by some companies began working on adding more support for hardware-accelerated 3D rendering to Mesa. The Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) was one of these approaches to interface Mesa, OpenGL and other 3D rendering API libraries with the device drivers and hardware. After reaching a basic level of usability, DRI support was officially added to Mesa. This significantly broadened the available range of hardware support achievable when using the Mesa library.  With adapting to DRI, the Mesa library finally took over the role of the front end component of a full scale OpenGL framework with varying backend components that could offer different degrees of 3D hardware support while not dropping the full software rendering capability. The total system used many different software components.  While the design requires all these components to interact carefully, the interfaces between them are relatively fixed. Nonetheless, as most components interacting with the Mesa stack are open source, experimental work is often done through altering several components at once as well as the interfaces between them. If such experiments prove successful, they can be incorporated into the next major or minor release. That applies e.g. to the update of the DRI specification developed in the 2007-2008 timeframe. The result of this experimentation, DRI2, operates without locks and with improved back buffer support. For this, a special git branch of Mesa was created.  DRI3 is supported by the Intel driver since 2013 and is default in some Linux distributions since 2016 to enable Vulkan support and more. It is also default on AMD hardware since late 2016 (X.Org Server 1.18.3 and newer).

Software renderer.

Mesa also contains an implementation of software rendering called swrast that allows shaders to run on the CPU as a fallback when no graphics hardware accelerators are present. The Gallium software rasterizer is known as "softpipe" or when built with support for LLVM "llvmpipe", which generates CPU code at runtime. Since Mesa 10.x OpenGL 3.3+ is supported for Softpipe (10.3) and LLVMpipe (10.2). Actual about 80% of Features from OpenGL 4.x are implemented in Mesa 17.3 (See Mesamatrix).  In Mesa 12.0 a new Intel Rasterizer OpenSWR is available with high advantages in clusters for large data sets. It's more focused on engineering visualisation than in game or art imagery and can only work on x86 processors. On the other hand, OpenGL 3.1+ is now supported. Acceleration values from 29 to 51 related to LLVMPIPE were measured in some examples. OpenGL 3.3+ is supported for OpenSWR since Mesa 17.1.  VirGL is a Rasterizer for Virtual machines implemented in Mesa 11.1 since 2015 with OpenGL 3.3 support and showed in Mesamatrix since Mesa 18. In actual new Mesa 18.2 it supports more than the others with OpenGL 4.3 and OpenGL ES 3.2. About 80% of OpenGL 4.4 and 4.5 features are also now ready. Vulkan Development starts with GSOC 2018 projects.

Mega drivers.

The idea of bundling multiple drivers into a single "mega" driver was proposed by Eric Anholt. It allows for a single copy of the shared Mesa code to be used among multiple drivers (instead of it existing in each driver separately) and offering better performance than a separate shared library due to the removal of the internal library interface. The state trackers for VDPAU and XvMC have become separate libraries.

shader-db.

shader-db is a collection of about 20,000 shaders gathered from various computer games and benchmarks as well as some scripts to compile these and collect some statistics. Shader-db is intended to help validate an optimization.  It was noticed that an unexpected number of shaders are not hand-written but generated. This means these shaders were originally written in HLSL and then translated into GLSL by some translator program, such as e.g. HLSL2GLSL. The problem is, that the generated code is often far from being optimal. Matt Turner said it was much easier to fix this in the translator program than having to make Mesa's compiler carry the burden of dealing with such bloated shaders.  shader-db cannot be considered free and open-source software. To use it legally, one must have a license for all the computer games that the shaders are part of.

Software architecture.

The so-called "user-mode graphics device drivers" (UMD) in Mesa have very few commonalities with what is generally called a device driver. There are a couple of differences:

Mesa's Intermediate Representations.

One goal of Mesa is the optimization of code that is to be executed by the respective GPU. Another is the sharing of code. Instead of documenting the pieces of software, that do this or that, this Wikipedia article shall instead look at the Intermediate Representations used in the process of compiling and optimizing. See Abstract syntax tree (AST) and Static single assignment form (SSA form).

SPIR-V.

SPIR-V is a certain version of the Standard Portable Intermediate Representation. The idea is, that graphics applications output SPIR-V instead of GLSL. In contrast to the latter, SPIR-V is binary to avoid implementation differences between GLSL compiler frontends of different driver implementations, as this has been a major source of application incompatibilities and bugs. Also SPIR-V binary usually also passed through some general optimizations. Also to some degree, SPIR-V's binary representation offers some degree of obfuscation, which might appeal to some software vendors as a form of intellectual property protection; however, SPIR-V contains ample information for reflection and tools exist that translate SPIR-V back into high quality, human readable high level code. A UMD needs only apply optimizations, that are specific to the supported hardware.

NIR.

NIR will be extended in next releases as base of Spir-V support. LLVMpipe, RadeonSI and Nouveau will change next to NIR from TGSI.

TGSI.

The Tungsten Graphics Shader Infrastructure (TGSI) was introduced in 2008 by Tungsten Graphics. All Gallium3D-style UMDs ingest TGSI.

LLVM IR.

The UMDs codice_2 and codice_3 do not output machine code, but instead LLVM IR. From here on, LLVM does optimizations and the compilation to machine code. This does mean, that a certain minimum version of LLVM has to be installed as well.

RADV ACO IR.

RADV ACO uses own IR that is close to NIR, for optimizing and generating end binary code for Vulkan SPIR-V shaders on top of Radeon GPUs (GCN 1+, aka GFX6+) GPUs. As of version 21.0.0 the ACO is only used in RADV (Vulkan driver) and not in RadeonSI yet.

Mesa's GLSL compiler.

Mesa's GLSL compiler generates its own IR. Because each driver has very different requirements from a LIR, it differentiates between HIR (high-level IR) and LIR (low-level IR).

Gallium3D.

Gallium3D is a set of interfaces and a collection of supporting libraries intended to ease the programming of device drivers for 3D graphics chipsets for multiple operating systems, rendering or video acceleration APIs.  A feature matrix is being provided at GalliumStatus, and the efforts of writing free and open-source device drivers for graphics chips is being separately documented in the Wikipedia: Free and open-source graphics device driver.  The development of Gallium3D started in 2008 at Tungsten Graphics, and the implementation is available as free and open-source software as part of Mesa 3D hosted by freedesktop.org. The primary goal of making driver development easier, bundling otherwise duplicated code of several different drivers at a single point, and to support modern hardware architectures. This is done by providing a better division of labor, for example, leaving memory management to the kernel DRI driver.  Gallium3D has been a part of Mesa since 2009 and is currently used by the free and open-source graphics driver for Nvidia (nouveau project), for AMD's R300–R900, Intel's 'Iris' driver for generation 8+ iGPUs and for other free and open-source GPU device drivers.

Software architecture.

Gallium3D eases programming of device drivers by splitting the graphics device driver into three parts. This is accomplished by the introduction of two interfaces: "Gallium3D State Tracker Interface" and the "Gallium3D WinSys Interface". The three components are called:  Gallium3D State Tracker  Gallium3D hardware device driver  Gallium3D WinSys

Differences from classic graphics drivers.

Gallium3D provides a unified API exposing standard hardware functions, such as shader units found on modern hardware. Thus, 3D APIs such as OpenGL 1.x/2.x, OpenGL 3.x, OpenVG, GPGPU infrastructure or even Direct3D (as found in the Wine compatibility layer) will need only a single back-end, called a state tracker, targeting the Gallium3D API. By contrast, classic-style DRI device drivers require a different back-end for each hardware platform and several other APIs need translation to OpenGL at the expense of code duplication. All vendor device drivers, due to their proprietary and closed-source nature, are written that way meaning that, e.g. the AMD Catalyst implements both OpenGL and Direct3D, and the vendor drivers for the GeForce have their implementations.  Under Gallium3D, Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel drivers will manage the memory and Direct Rendering Interface (DRI2) drivers will be more GPU processing oriented. During the transition period from userspace modesetting to kernelspace modesetting some of the Mesa 3D drivers, such as the radeon driver or Intel's drivers, ended up supporting both DRI1 and DRI2 and used DRI2 if available on the system. Gallium3D additionally requires a level of shader support that is not available on older cards like e.g. ATi r100-r200 so users for those cards need to keep using Mesa 3D with DRI2 for their 3D usage.

Tungsten Graphics Shader Infrastructure.

Tungsten Graphics Shader Infrastructure (TGSI) is an Intermediate representation like LLVM Intermediate Representation or the new Standard Portable Intermediate Representation (SPIR) to be used by the Vulkan API and OpenCL 2.1. Shaders written in OpenGL Shading Language are to be translated/compiled into TGSI, then optimizations are made, and then the TGSI shaders are being compiled into shaders for the instruction set of the used GPU.

LLVM usage.

In addition, using the modular structure of Gallium3D, there is an effort underway to use the LLVM compiler suite and create a module to optimize shader code on the fly.  The library represents each shader program using an extensible binary intermediate representation called Tungsten Graphics Shader Infrastructure (TGSI), which LLVM then translates into GLSL shaders optimized for target hardware.

Adoption.

Several free and open-source graphics device drivers, which have been, or are being written based on information gained through clean-room reverse engineering, adopted the driver model provided by Gallium3D, e.g. nouveau and others ("see Free and open-source graphics device driver for a complete list"). The main reason may be that the Gallium3D driver model lessens the amount of code required to be written. Of course, being licensed under a free software license, this code can at any time by anybody be rewritten to implement the DRI-, or some other, driver model.

History.

Original authors of Gallium3D were Keith Whitwell and Brian Paul at Tungsten Graphics (acquired by VMware in 2008.

Milestones.

As of fall 2011, there were at least 10 known, mature and working Gallium3D drivers. Open-source drivers for Nvidia graphics cards by the name of Nouveau team develops its drivers using the Gallium3D framework.  2008-07-13: Nouveau development is done exclusively for the Gallium framework. The old DRI driver was removed from the master branch of the Mesa repository on Freedesktop.org.  2009-02-11: The gallium-0.2 branch was merged into mainline Master branch of Mesa. Development is done in Mesa mainline.  2009-02-25: Gallium3D can run on Linux as well as FreeBSD kernels.  2009-05-01: Zack Rusin from Tungsten Graphics added the OpenVG state tracker to Mesa 3D, which enables Scalable Vector Graphics to be hardware-accelerated by any Gallium3D-based driver.  2009-07-17: Mesa3D 7.5 is released, the first version to include Gallium3D.  2010-09-10: Initial support for the Evergreen GPUs was added to the r600g driver.  2010-09-21: There are two Gallium3D drivers for ATI hardware known as r300g and r600g for R300-R500 and R600-Evergreen GPUs respectively.  2010-09-21: Major commits were made to the code to support Direct3D 10 and 11. In time, this might offer the ability to use recent Direct3D implementations on GNU/Linux systems.  2011-11-30: Intel 965g and Cell Gallium drivers were removed from the master branch of Mesa as unmaintained and broken.  2013-11-30: Mesa 10 with OpenGL 3.2, 3.3 and OpenCL 1.0+  2014-11-18: Major commits were made to the code to support Direct3D 9.  2015-09-15: Mesa 11 with OpenGL 4.0, 4.1 and OpenCL 1.2 (incomplete)  2015-12-15: Mesa 11.1 Driver VIRGL for virtual machines with OpenGL 3.3  2016-07-08: Mesa 12 with OpenGL 4.2, 4.3 and Vulkan 1.0 (Intel ANV and AMD RADV)  2016-11-01: Mesa 13 with OpenGL 4.4 and OpenGL ES 3.2  2017-02-13: Mesa 17.0 with OpenGL 4.5 and freedreno driver with OpenGL 3.0 and 3.1  2017-05-10: Mesa 17.1 OpenGL 4.2+ for Intel Ivy Bridge (more than Intel driver for Windows, OpenGL 3.3+ for Intel Open SWR Rasterizer (important for cluster Computer for huge simulations)  2017-12-08: Mesa 17.3 AMD Vulkan Driver RADV full compliant in Khronos Test of Vulkan 1.0  2018-05-18: Mesa 18.1 with Vulkan 1.1 (Intel ANV and AMD RADV)  2018-09-07: Mesa 18.2 with OpenGL 4.3 for Soft Driver VIRGL (important for virtual machines in cloud Cluster Computer), OpenGL ES 3.1 for Freedreno with Adreno A5xx  2019-06-11: Mesa 19.1 released with Intel's next generation 'iris' graphics driver for generation 8+ iGPUs  2019-12-11: Mesa 19.3 released OpenGL 4.6 with Intel i965 with gen 7+ and optional Iris Gen 8+  2020-03-18: Mesa 20.0 released OpenGL 4.6 with AMD GCN

History.

Project initiator Brian Paul was a graphics hobbyist. He thought it would be fun to implement a simple 3D graphics library using the OpenGL API, which he might then use instead of VOGL (very ordinary GL Like Library). Beginning in 1993, he spent eighteen months of part-time development before he released the software on the Internet. The software was well received, and people began contributing to its development. Mesa started off by rendering all 3D computer graphics on the CPU. Despite this, the internal architecture of Mesa was designed to be open for attaching to graphics processor-accelerated 3D rendering. In this first phase, rendering was done indirectly in the display server, leaving some overhead and noticeable speed lagging behind the theoretical maximum. The Diamond Monster 3D, using the Voodoo Graphics chipset, was one of the first 3D hardware devices supported by Mesa.  The first true graphics hardware support was added to Mesa in 1997, based upon the Glide API for the then new 3dfx Voodoo I/II graphics cards and their successors. A major problem of using Glide as the acceleration layer was the habit of Glide to run full screen, which was only suitable for computer games. Further, Glide took the lock of the screen memory, and thus the display server was blocked from doing any other GUI tasks.

Mesa, also called Mesa3D and The Mesa 3D Graphics Library, is an open source software implementation of OpenGL, Vulkan, and other graphics API specifications. Mesa translates these specifications to vendor-specific graphics hardware drivers.

Mesa 3D (často jen Mesa) je open source implementací knihovny 3D grafiky OpenGL pro renderování 3D grafiky na různých platformách. Byla původně vyvinuta v srpnu 1993 Brianem Paulem. Přestože Mesa 3D není oficiálně licencovaná OpenGL implementace, struktura, syntax a sémantika API se shoduje s OpenGL. Ve své současné podobě lze zkompilovat prakticky na všech moderních platformách. Mesa je využívána například v X.Org (X.org je implementace GUI pro systémy Linux, Mac OS X a další BSD systémy).


1649–1653.

Rump Parliament.

The Rump was created by Pride's Purge of those members of the Long Parliament who did not support the political position of the Grandees in the New Model Army. Just before and after the execution of King Charles I on 30 January 1649, the Rump passed a number of acts of Parliament creating the legal basis for the republic. With the abolition of the monarchy, Privy Council and the House of Lords, it had unchecked executive and legislative power. The English Council of State, which replaced the Privy Council, took over many of the executive functions of the monarchy. It was selected by the Rump, and most of its members were MPs. However, the Rump depended on the support of the Army with which it had a very uneasy relationship. After the execution of Charles I, the House of Commons abolished the monarchy and the House of Lords. It declared the people of England "and of all the Dominions and Territories thereunto belonging" to be henceforth under the governance of a "Commonwealth", effectively a republic.

Structure.

In Pride's Purge, all members of parliament (including most of the political Presbyterians) who would not accept the need to bring the King to trial had been removed. Thus the Rump never had more than two hundred members (less than half the number of the Commons in the original Long Parliament). They included: supporters of religious independents who did not want an established church and some of whom had sympathies with the Levellers; Presbyterians who were willing to countenance the trial and execution of the King; and later admissions, such as formerly excluded MPs who were prepared to denounce the Newport Treaty negotiations with the King.  Most Rumpers were gentry, though there was a higher proportion of lesser gentry and lawyers than in previous parliaments. Less than one-quarter of them were regicides. This left the Rump as basically a conservative body whose vested interests in the existing land ownership and legal systems made it unlikely to want to reform them.

Issues and achievements.

For the first two years of the Commonwealth, the Rump faced economic depression and the risk of invasion from Scotland and Ireland. By 1653 Cromwell and the Army had largely eliminated these threats.  There were many disagreements amongst factions of the Rump. Some wanted a republic, but others favoured retaining some type of monarchical government. Most of England's traditional ruling classes regarded the Rump as an illegal government made up of regicides and upstarts. However, they were also aware that the Rump might be all that stood in the way of an outright military dictatorship. High taxes, mainly to pay the Army, were resented by the gentry. Limited reforms were enough to antagonise the ruling class but not enough to satisfy the radicals.  Despite its unpopularity, the Rump was a link with the old constitution and helped to settle England down and make it secure after the biggest upheaval in its history. By 1653, France and Spain had recognised England's new government.

Reforms.

Though the Church of England was retained, episcopacy was suppressed and the Act of Uniformity 1558 was repealed in September 1650. Mainly on the insistence of the Army, many independent churches were tolerated, although everyone still had to pay tithes to the established church.  Some small improvements were made to law and court procedure; for example, all court proceedings were now conducted in English rather than in Law French or Latin. However, there were no widespread reforms of the common law. This would have upset the gentry, who regarded the common law as reinforcing their status and property rights.  The Rump passed many restrictive laws to regulate people's moral behaviour, such as closing down theatres and requiring strict observance of Sunday. This antagonised most of the gentry.

Dismissal.

Cromwell, aided by Thomas Harrison, forcibly dismissed the Rump on 20 April 1653, for reasons that are unclear. Theories are that he feared the Rump was trying to perpetuate itself as the government, or that the Rump was preparing for an election which could return an anti-Commonwealth majority. Many former members of the Rump continued to regard themselves as England's only legitimate constitutional authority. The Rump had not agreed to its own dissolution; their legal, constitutional view it was unlawful was based on Charles' concessionary Act prohibiting the dissolution of Parliament without its own consent (on 11 May 1641, leading to the entire Commonwealth being the latter years of the Long Parliament in their majority view).

Barebone's Parliament, July–December 1653.

The dissolution of the Rump was followed by a short period in which Cromwell and the Army ruled alone. Nobody had the constitutional authority to call an election, but Cromwell did not want to impose a military dictatorship. Instead, he ruled through a 'nominated assembly' which he believed would be easy for the Army to control since Army officers did the nominating.  Barebone's Parliament was opposed by former Rumpers and ridiculed by many gentries as being an assembly of 'inferior' people. However, over 110 of its 140 members were lesser gentry or of higher social status. (An exception was Praise-God Barebone, a Baptist merchant after whom the Assembly got its derogatory nickname.) Many were well educated.  The assembly reflected the range of views of the officers who nominated it. The Radicals (approximately 40) included a hard core of Fifth Monarchists who wanted to be rid of Common Law and any state control of religion. The Moderates (approximately 60) wanted some improvements within the existing system and might move to either the radical or conservative side depending on the issue. The Conservatives (approximately 40) wanted to keep the status quo (since Common Law protected the interests of the gentry, and tithes and advowsons were valuable property).  Cromwell saw Barebone's Parliament as a temporary legislative body which he hoped would produce reforms and develop a constitution for the Commonwealth. However, members were divided over key issues, only 25 had previous parliamentary experience, and although many had some legal training, there were no qualified lawyers.  Cromwell seems to have expected this group of 'amateurs' to produce reform without management or direction. When the radicals mustered enough support to defeat a bill which would have preserved the status quo in religion, the conservatives, together with many moderates, surrendered their authority back to Cromwell who sent soldiers to clear the rest of the Assembly. Barebone's Parliament was over.

The Protectorate, 1653–1659.

Throughout 1653, Cromwell and the Army slowly dismantled the machinery of the Commonwealth state. The English Council of State, which had assumed the executive function formerly held by the King and his Privy Council, was forcibly dissolved by Cromwell on 20 April, and in its place a new council, filled with Cromwell's own chosen men, was installed. Three days after Barebone's Parliament dissolved itself, the Instrument of Government was adopted by Cromwell's council and a new state structure, now known historically as The Protectorate, was given its shape. This new constitution granted Cromwell sweeping powers as Lord Protector, an office which ironically had much the same role and powers as the King had under the monarchy, a fact not lost on Cromwell's critics.  On 12 April 1654, under the terms of the Tender of Union, the "Ordinance for uniting Scotland into one Commonwealth with England" was issued by the Lord Protector and proclaimed in Scotland by the military governor of Scotland, General George Monck, 1st Duke of Albemarle. The ordinance declared that "the people of Scotland should be united with the people of England into one Commonwealth and under one Government" and decreed that a new "Arms of the Commonwealth", incorporating the Saltire, should be placed on "all the public seals, seals of office, and seals of bodies civil or corporate, in Scotland" as "a badge of this Union".

First Protectorate Parliament.

Cromwell and his Council of State spent the first several months of 1654 preparing for the First Protectorate Parliament by drawing up a set of 84 bills for consideration. The Parliament was freely elected (as free as such elections could be in the 17th century) and as such, the Parliament was filled with a wide range of political interests, and as such did not accomplish any of its goals; it was dissolved as soon as law would allow by Cromwell having passed none of Cromwell's proposed bills.

Rule of the Major-Generals and Second Protectorate Parliament.

Having decided that Parliament was not an efficient means of getting his policies enacted, Cromwell instituted a system of direct military rule of England during a period known as the Rule of the Major-Generals; all of England was divided into ten regions, each was governed directly by one of Cromwell's Major-Generals, who were given sweeping powers to collect taxes and enforce the peace. The Major-Generals were highly unpopular, a fact that they themselves noticed and many urged Cromwell to call another Parliament to give his rule legitimacy.  Unlike the prior Parliament, which had been open to all eligible males in the Commonwealth, the new elections specifically excluded Catholics and Royalists from running or voting; as a result, it was stocked with members who were more in line with Cromwell's own politics. The first major bill to be brought up for debate was the Militia Bill, which was ultimately voted down by the House. As a result, the authority of the Major-Generals to collect taxes to support their own regimes ended, and the Rule of the Major Generals came to an end. The second piece of major legislation was the passage of the Humble Petition and Advice, a sweeping constitutional reform which had two purposes. The first was to reserve for Parliament certain rights, such as a three-year fixed term (which the Lord Protector was required to abide by) and to reserve for the Parliament the sole right of taxation. The second, as a concession to Cromwell, was to make the Lord Protector a hereditary position and to convert the title to a formal constitutional Kingship. Cromwell refused the title as King, but accepted the rest of the legislation, which was passed in final form on 25 May 1657.  A second session of the Parliament met in 1658; it allowed previously excluded MPs (who had been not allowed to take their seats because of Catholic and/or Royalist leanings) to take their seats, however this made the Parliament far less compliant to the wishes of Cromwell and the Major-Generals; it accomplished little in the way of a legislative agenda and was dissolved after a few months.

Richard Cromwell and the Third Protectorate Parliament.

On the death of Oliver Cromwell in 1658, his son, Richard Cromwell, inherited the title, Lord Protector. Richard had never served in the Army, which means he lost control over the Major-Generals that had been the source of his own father's power. The Third Protectorate Parliament was summoned in late 1658 and was seated on 27 January 1659. Its first act was to confirm Richard's role as Lord Protector, which it did by a sizeable, but not overwhelming, majority. Quickly, however, it became apparent that Richard had no control over the Army and divisions quickly developed in the Parliament. One faction called for a recall of the Rump Parliament and a return to the constitution of the Commonwealth, while another preferred the existing constitution. As the parties grew increasingly quarrelsome, Richard dissolved it. He was quickly removed from power, and the remaining Army leadership recalled the Rump Parliament, setting the stage for the return of the Monarchy a year later.

1659–1660.

After the Grandees in the New Model Army removed Richard, they reinstalled the Rump Parliament on May 1659. Charles Fleetwood was appointed a member of the Committee of Safety and of the Council of State, and one of the seven commissioners for the army. On 9 June he was nominated lord-general (commander-in-chief) of the army. However, his power was undermined in parliament, which chose to disregard the army's authority in a similar fashion to the pre–Civil War parliament. On 12 October 1659 the Commons cashiered General John Lambert and other officers, and installed Fleetwood as chief of a military council under the authority of the Speaker. The next day Lambert ordered that the doors of the House be shut and the members kept out. On 26 October a "Committee of Safety" was appointed, of which Fleetwood and Lambert were members. Lambert was appointed major-general of all the forces in England and Scotland, Fleetwood being general. Lambert was now sent, by the Committee of Safety, with a large force to meet George Monck, who was in command of the English forces in Scotland, and either negotiate with him or force him to come to terms.  It was into this atmosphere that General George Monck marched south with his army from Scotland. Lambert's army began to desert him, and he returned to London almost alone. On 21 February 1660, Monck reinstated the Presbyterian members of the Long Parliament'secluded' by Pride, so that they could prepare legislation for a new parliament. Fleetwood was deprived of his command and ordered to appear before parliament to answer for his conduct. On 3 March Lambert was sent to the Tower, from which he escaped a month later. Lambert tried to rekindle the civil war in favour of the Commonwealth by issuing a proclamation calling on all supporters of the "Good Old Cause" to rally on the battlefield of Edgehill. However, he was recaptured by Colonel Richard Ingoldsby, a regicide who hoped to win a pardon by handing Lambert over to the new regime. The Long Parliament dissolved itself on 16 March.  On 4 April 1660, in response to a secret message sent by Monck, Charles II issued the Declaration of Breda, which made known the conditions of his acceptance of the crown of England. Monck organised the Convention Parliament, which met for the first time on 25 April. On 8 May it proclaimed that King Charles II had been the lawful monarch since the execution of Charles I in January 1649. Charles returned from exile on 23 May. He entered London on 29 May, his birthday. To celebrate "his Majesty's Return to his Parliament" 29 May was made a public holiday, popularly known as Oak Apple Day. He was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 23 April 1661.

The Commonwealth was the political structure during the period from 1649 to 1660 when England and Wales, later along with Ireland and Scotland, were governed as a republic after the end of the Second English Civil War and the trial and execution of Charles I. The republic's existence was declared through "An Act declaring England to be a Commonwealth", adopted by the Rump Parliament on 19 May 1649. Power in the early Commonwealth was vested primarily in the Parliament and a Council of State. During the period, fighting continued, particularly in Ireland and Scotland, between the parliamentary forces and those opposed to them, as part of what is now referred to as the Third English Civil War.

Anglická republika bylo období v letech 1649 až 1653 a poté 1659 až 1660, kdy byla nejdříve Anglie (včetně Walesu) a později i Irsko a Skotsko spravována jako republika, oficiálně Anglické společenství (anglicky "Commonwealth of England", nezaměňovat za Společenství národů). Po popravě Karla I. Stuarta v roce 1649 prohlásil 19. května anglický parlament (označovaný jako Kusý parlament, anglicky "Rump Parliament") Anglii za republiku. Období let 1653 až 1659 je nazýváno protektorátem, a země byla řízena přímo Oliverem Cromwellem a po jeho smrti jeho synem Richardem jako lordy protektory.


Description.

There are many colour forms of the male common pheasant, ranging in colour from nearly white to almost black in some melanistic examples. These are due to captive breeding and hybridization between subspecies and with the green pheasant, reinforced by continual releases of stock from varying sources to the wild. For example, the "ring-necked pheasants" common in Europe, North America and Australia do not pertain to any specific taxon, they rather represent a stereotyped hybrid swarm. Body weight can range from, with males averaging and females averaging.  The adult male common pheasant of the nominate subspecies "Phasianus colchicus colchicus" is in length with a long brown streaked black tail, accounting for almost of the total length. The body plumage is barred bright gold or fiery copper-red and chestnut-brown plumage with iridescent sheen of green and purple; but rump uniform is sometimes blue. The wing coverage is white or cream and black-barred markings are common on the tail. The head is bottle green with a small crest and distinctive red wattle. "P. c. colchicus" and some other races lack a white neck ring. Behind the face are two ear-tufts, that make the pheasant more alert.  The female (hen) and juveniles are much less showy, with a duller mottled brown plumage all over and measuring long including a tail of around. Juvenile birds have the appearance of the female with a shorter tail until young males begin to grow characteristic bright feathers on the breast, head and back at about 10 weeks after hatching.  The green pheasant ("P. versicolor") is very similar, and hybridization often makes the identity of individual birds difficult to determine. Green pheasant males on average have a shorter tail than the common pheasant and have darker plumage that is uniformly bottle-green on the breast and belly; they always lack a neck ring. Green pheasant females are darker, with many black dots on the breast and belly.  In addition, various color mutations are commonly encountered, mainly melanistic (black) and flavistic (isabelline or fawn) specimens. The former are rather common in some areas and are named Tenebrosus pheasant ("P. colchicus" var. "tenebrosus").

Taxonomy and systematics.

This species was first scientifically described by Linnaeus in his "Systema naturae" in 1758 under its current scientific name. The common pheasant is distinct enough from any other species known to Linnaeus for a laconic "[Phasianus] rufus, capîte caeruleo" – "a red pheasant with blue head" – to serve as entirely sufficient description. Moreover, the bird had been extensively discussed before Linnaeus established binomial nomenclature. His sources are the "Ornithologia" of Ulisse Aldrovandi, Giovanni Pietro Olina's "Uccelliera", John Ray's "Synopsis methodica Avium & Piscium", and "A natural history of the birds" by Eleazar Albin. Therein—essentially the bulk of the ornithology textbooks of his day—the species is simply named "the pheasant" in the books' respective languages. Whereas in other species, such as the eastern meadowlark ("Sturnella magna"), Linnaeus felt it warranted to cite plumage details from his sources, in the common pheasant's case he simply referred to the reason of the bird's fame: "principum mensis dicatur". The type locality is given simply as "Africa, Asia".  However, the bird does not occur in Africa, except perhaps in Linnaeus' time in Mediterranean coastal areas where they might have been introduced during the Roman Empire. The type locality was later fixed to the Rioni River in Western Georgia – known as "Phasis" to the Ancient Greeks. These birds, until the modern era, constituted the bulk of the introduced stock in parts of Europe that wasn't already present; the birds described by Linnaeus' sources, though typically belonging to such early introductions, would certainly have more alleles in common with the transcaucasian population than with others. The scientific name is Latin for "pheasant from Colchis", "colchicus" referring to the west of modern-day Georgia; the Ancient Greek term corresponding to the English "pheasant" is Phasianos ornis (Φασιανὸς ὂρνις), "bird of the river Phasis". Although Linnaeus included many Galliformes in his genus "Phasianius"—such as the domestic chicken and its wild ancestor the red junglefowl, nowadays "Gallus gallus"—today only the common and the green pheasant are placed in this genus. As the latter was not known to Linnaeus in 1758, the common pheasant is naturally the type species of "Phasianus".  In the US, common pheasants are widely known as "ring-necked pheasants". More colloquial North American names include "chinks" or, in Montana, "phezzens". In China, meanwhile, the species is properly called zhi ji ()—"pheasant-fowl"—essentially implying the same as the English name "common pheasant". Like elsewhere, "P. colchicus" is such a familiar bird in China that it is usually just referred to as shan ji (山雞), "mountain chicken", a Chinese term for pheasants in general.  As of 2005, it had the smallest known genome of all living amniotes, only 0.97 pg (970 million base pairs), roughly one-third of the human genome's size; however, the black-chinned hummingbird is now currently held to have the smallest.

Subspecies.

There are about 30 subspecies in five up to eight groups. These can be identified according to the male plumage, namely presence or absence of a white neck-ring and/or a white superciliary stripe, the color of the uppertail (rump) and wing coverts, and the color of crown, chest, upper back, and flank feathers. As noted above, introduced population in our time mix the alleles of various races in various amounts, differing according to the original stock used for introductions and what natural selection according to climate and habitat has made of that.  An investigation into the genetic relationships of subspecies revealed that the earliest subspecies is likely to have been "elegans", suggesting that the Common Pheasant originated from the forests of southeastern China. Initial divergence is thought to have occurred around 3.4 Mya. The lack of agreement between morphology-based subspecies delimitation and their genetic relationships is thought to be attributed to past isolation followed by more recent population mixing as the pheasant has expanded its range across the western Palaearctic.  Sometimes this species is split into the Central Asian common and the East Asian ring-necked pheasants, roughly separated by the arid and high mountainous regions of Turkestan. However, while the western and eastern populations probably were entirely separate during the Zyryanka glaciation when deserts were more extensive, this separation was not long enough for actual speciation to occur. Today, the largest variety of color patterns is found where the western and eastern populations mix, as is to be expected. Females usually cannot be identified even to subspecies group with certainty.  Many subspecies are in danger to disappear due to hybridization with introduced birds. The last indigenous black-necked pheasant ("P. c. colchicus") population in Europe survives in Greece in the delta of the river Nestos, where in 2012 the population was estimated 100-250 individuals.  The subspecies groups, going from west to east, and some notable subspecies are:  Within a maximum clade credibility mDNA gene tree, the most basal group is the "Elegans"-group of the Eastern Clade, diverging from the Green pheasant during the Calabrian, and diversifying in Middle Pleistocene around 0.7 Million years ago, with the groups of the Western Clade splitting off from those of the Eastern Clade about 0.59 Million years ago. While the subspecies of the Western Clade are well geographically separated from each other, the subspecies of the Eastern clade often show clinal variation and large areas of intergradation. For example, clines connect "pallasi-karpowi-torquatus-takatsukasae" within the "Torquatus"-group and "kiangsuensis-alaschanicus-sohokhotensis-strauchi" within the "Strauchi/vlangalii"-group, with the degree of expression of white collar and superciliary stripe in both cases decreasing from North to South.

Ecology.

Common pheasants are native to Asia and parts of Europe, their original range extending from the Balkans (where the last truly wild birds survive around Nestos river in Greece), the Black and Caspian Seas to Manchuria, Siberia, Korea, Mainland China, and Taiwan. The birds are found in woodland, farmland, scrub, and wetlands. In its natural habitat the common pheasant lives in grassland near water with small copses of trees. Extensively cleared farmland is marginal habitat that cannot maintain self-sustaining populations for long  Common pheasants are gregarious birds and outside the breeding season form loose flocks. However, captive bred Common Pheasants can show strong sexual segregation, in space and time, with sex differences in the use of feeding stations throughout the day. Wherever they are hunted they are always timid once they associate humans with danger, and will quickly retreat for safety after hearing the arrival of hunting parties in the area.  While common pheasants are able short-distance fliers, they prefer to run. If startled however, they can suddenly burst upwards at great speed, with a distinctive "whirring" wing sound and often giving "kok kok kok" calls to alert conspecifics. Their flight speed is only when cruising but when chased they can fly up to.

Nesting.

Common pheasants nest solely on the ground in scrapes, lined with some grass and leaves, frequently under dense cover or a hedge. Occasionally they will nest in a haystack, or old nest left by other birds they roost in sheltered trees at night. The males are polygynous as is typical for many Phasianidae, and are often accompanied by a harem of several females. Common pheasants produce a clutch of around 8–15 eggs, sometimes as many as 18, but usually 10 to 12; they are pale olive in colour, and laid over a 2–3 week period in April to June. The incubation period is about 22–27 days. The chicks stay near the hen for several weeks, yet leave the nest when only a few hours old. After hatching they grow quickly, flying after 12–14 days, resembling adults by only 15 weeks of age.  They eat a wide variety of animal and vegetable type-food, like fruit, seeds, grain, mast, berries and leaves as well as a wide range of invertebrates, such as leatherjackets, ant eggs, wireworms, caterpillars, grasshoppers and other insects; with small vertebrates like lizards, field voles, small mammals, and small birds occasionally taken.

European native.

Southern Caucasian Pheasants "P.c.colchicus" were common in Greece during the classical period and it is a widespread myth that the Greeks brought pheasants to the Balkans when they colonized Colchis in the Caucasus. This colonization happened during the 6th century BC, but pheasant archaeological remains in the Balkans are much older dating to 6th millennium BC. This fact indicates that probably pheasants reached the area naturally. Additionally it seems that they had a continuous range in Turkey from the Sea of Marmara on the edge of the Balkans, across the northern shore of the country till Caucasus. The last remnants of the Balkan population survive in the Kotza-Orman riparian forest of Nestos, in Greece with an estimated population of 100-200 adult birds. In Bulgaria they were lost in the 1970s because they hybridized with introduced eastern subspecies.  Besides the Balkans the species lives in Europe in the area north of Caucasus where the local subspecies "P.c.septentrionalis" survives pure around the lower reaches of the Samur River. Reintroduction efforts in the rest of the north Caucasian range may include hybrid birds.

As an introduced species.

Common pheasants can now be found across the globe due to their readiness to breed in captivity and the fact they can naturalise in many climates, but were known to be introduced in Europe, North America, Japan and New Zealand. Pheasants were hunted in their natural range by Stone Age humans just like the grouse, partridges, junglefowls and perhaps peafowls that inhabited Europe at that time. At least since the Roman Empire, the bird was extensively introduced in many places and has become a naturalized member at least of the European fauna. Introductions in the Southern Hemisphere have mostly failed, except where local Galliformes or their ecological equivalents are rare or absent.  The bird was naturalized in Great Britain around A.D. 1059, but may have been introduced by the Romano-British centuries earlier. It was the Caucasian subspecies mistakenly known as the 'Old English Pheasant' rather than the Chinese ring-necked pheasants ("torquatus") that were introduced to Britain. But it became extirpated from most of the isles in the early 17th century. There were further re-introductions of the 'white neck-ringed' variety in the 18th century. It was rediscovered as a game bird in the 1830s after being ignored for many years in an amalgam of forms. Since then it has been reared extensively by gamekeepers and was shot in season from 1 October to 31 January. Pheasants are well adapted to the British climate and breed naturally in the wild without human supervision in copses, heaths and commons.  By 1950 pheasants bred throughout the British Isles, although they were scarce in Ireland. Because around 30,000,000 pheasants are released each year on shooting estates, mainly in the Midlands and South of England, it is widespread in distribution, although most released birds survive less than a year in the wild. The Bohemian was most likely seen in North Norfolk. The Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust is researching the breeding success of reared pheasants and trying to find ways to improve this breeding success to reduce the demand to release as many reared pheasants and increase the wild population. As the original Caucasian stock all but disappeared during the Early Modern era, most 'dark-winged ringless' birds in the U.K. are actually descended from 'Chinese ring-necked' and 'green pheasant' hybrids, which were commonly used for rewilding.

North America.

Common pheasants were introduced in North America in 1773, and have become well established throughout much of the Rocky Mountain states (Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, etc.), the Midwest, the Plains states, as well as Canada and Mexico. In the southwest, they can even be seen south of the Rockies in Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge south of Albuquerque, New Mexico. It is now most common on the Great Plains. Common pheasants have also been introduced to much of northwest Europe, the Hawaiian Islands, Chile, Uruguay, Peru, Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia including the island state of Tasmania and small offshore islands such as Rottnest Island off Western Australia.  Most common pheasants bagged in the United States are wild-born feral pheasants. In some states captive-reared and released birds make up much of the population.  Pheasant hunting is very popular in much of the U.S., especially in the Great Plains states, where a mix of farmland and native grasslands provides ideal habitat. South Dakota alone has an annual harvest of over a million birds a year by over 200,000 hunters.

As gamebirds.

Common pheasants are bred to be hunted and are shot in great numbers in Europe, especially the U.K., where they are shot on the traditional formal "driven shoot" principles, whereby paying guns have birds driven over them by beaters, and on smaller "rough shoots". The open season in the U.K. is 1 October – 1 February, under the Game Act 1831. Generally they are shot by hunters employing gun dogs to help find, flush and retrieve shot birds. Retrievers, spaniels and pointing breeds are used to hunt pheasants.  The doggerel "Up gets a guinea, bang goes a penny-halfpenny, and down comes a half a crown" reflects the expensive sport of 19th century driven shoots in Britain, when pheasants were often shot for sport, rather than as food. It was a popular royal pastime in Britain to shoot common pheasants. King George V shot over 1,000 pheasants out of a total bag of 3,937 over a six-day period in December 1913 during a competition with a friend; however, he did not do enough to beat him.  Common pheasants are traditionally a target of small game poachers in the U.K. but, due to the low value of pheasants in the modern day, some have resorted to stealing chicks or poults from pens. The Roald Dahl novel "Danny the Champion of the World" dealt with a poacher (and his son) who lived in the United Kingdom and illegally hunted common pheasants.  Pheasant farming is a common practice and is sometimes done intensively. Birds are supplied both to hunting preserves/estates and restaurants, with smaller numbers being available for home cooks.  The carcasses were often hung for a time to improve the meat by slight decomposition, as with most other game. Modern cookery generally uses moist roasting and farm-raised female birds. In the U.K. and U.S., game is making somewhat of a comeback in popular cooking and more pheasants than ever are being sold in supermarkets there. A major reason for this is consumer attitude shift from consumption of red meat to white meat.

The common pheasant ("Phasianus colchicus") is a bird in the pheasant family (Phasianidae). The genus name comes from Latin "phasianus", "pheasant". The species name "colchicus" is Latin for "of Colchis" (modern day Georgia), a country on the Black Sea where pheasants became known to Europeans. It diverged from the genus Gallus where domestic chicken belong about 20 million years ago.

Bažant obecný ("") je velký, pestře zbarvený pták z řádu hrabavých. Ze svého původního areálu v Asii byl člověkem uměle vysazen do Evropy, Ameriky i Austrálie. Člověkem je využíván jako okrasný pták a lovná zvěř.


Description.

Capital.

The major features of the Ionic order are the volutes of its capital, which have been the subject of much theoretical and practical discourse, based on a brief and obscure passage in Vitruvius. The only tools required to design these features were a straight-edge, a right angle, string (to establish half-lengths) and a compass. Below the volutes, the Ionic column may have a wide collar or banding separating the capital from the fluted shaft (as in, for example, the neoclassical mansion Castle Coole), or a swag of fruit and flowers may swing from the clefts or "neck" formed by the volutes.  Originally, the volutes lay in a single plane ("illustration at right"); then it was seen that they could be angled out on the corners. This feature of the Ionic order made it more pliant and satisfactory than the Doric to critical eyes in the 4th century BC: angling the volutes on the corner columns ensured that they "read" equally when seen from either front or side facade. However, some classical artists viewed this as unsatisfactory, feeling that the placement of Ionic columns at building corners required a distortion at the expense of the capital's structural logic; the Corinthian order would solve this by reading equally well from all angles. The 16th-century Renaissance architect and theorist Vincenzo Scamozzi designed a version of such a perfectly four-sided Ionic capital that it became standard; when a Greek Ionic order was eventually reintroduced in the later 18th century Greek Revival, it conveyed an air of archaic freshness and primitive, perhaps even republican, vitality.

Columns and entablature.

The Ionic column is always more slender than the Doric; therefore, it always has a base: Ionic columns are eight and nine column-diameters tall, and even more in the Antebellum colonnades of late American Greek Revival plantation houses.  Ionic columns are most often fluted. After a little early experimentation, the number of hollow flutes in the shaft settled at 24. This standardization kept the fluting in a familiar proportion to the diameter of the column at any scale, even when the height of the column was exaggerated. Roman fluting leaves a little of the column surface between each hollow; Greek fluting runs out to a knife edge that was easily scarred.  In some instances, the fluting has been omitted. English architect Inigo Jones introduced a note of sobriety with plain Ionic columns on his Banqueting House, Whitehall, London, and when Beaux-Arts architect John Russell Pope wanted to convey the manly stamina combined with intellect of Theodore Roosevelt, he left colossal Ionic columns unfluted on the Roosevelt memorial at the American Museum of Natural History, New York City, for an unusual impression of strength and stature. Wabash Railroad architect R.E. Mohr included eight unfluted Ionic frontal columns on his 1928 design for the railroad's St. Louis suburban stop Delmar Station. The entablature resting on the columns has three parts: a plain architrave divided into two, or more generally three, bands, with a frieze resting on it that may be richly sculptural, and a cornice built up with dentils (like the closely spaced ends of joists), with a corona ("crown") and cyma ("ogee") molding to support the projecting roof. Pictorial often narrative bas-relief frieze carving provides a characteristic feature of the Ionic order, in the area where the Doric order is articulated with triglyphs. Roman and Renaissance practice condensed the height of the entablature by reducing the proportions of the architrave, which made the frieze more prominent.

Anta capital.

The Ionic anta capital is the Ionic version of the anta capital, the crowning portion of an anta, which is the front edge of a supporting wall in Greek temple architecture. The anta is generally crowned by a stone block designed to spread the load from superstructure (entablature) it supports, called an "anta capital" when it is structural, or sometimes "pilaster capital" if it is only decorative as often during the Roman period.  In order not to protrude unduly from the wall, these anta capitals usually display a rather flat surface, so that the capital has more or less a rectangular-shaped structure overall. The Ionic anta capital, in contrast to the regular column capitals, is highly decorated and generally includes bands of alternating lotuses and flame palmettes, and bands of eggs and darts and beads and reels patterns, in order to maintain continuity with the decorative frieze lining the top of the walls. This difference with the column capitals disappeared with Roman times, when anta or pilaster capitals have designs very similar to those of the column capitals. The Ionic anta capitals as can be seen in the Ionic order temple of the Erechtheion (circa 410 BCE), are characteristically rectangular Ionic anta capitals, with extensive bands of floral patterns in prolongation of adjoining friezes.

History of use.

The Ionic order originated in the mid-6th century BC in Ionia (broadly equivalent to modern day İzmir Province), as well as the southwestern coastland and islands of Asia Minor settled by Ionians, where Ionic Greek was spoken. The Ionic order column was being practiced in mainland Greece in the 5th century BC. It was most popular in the Archaic Period (750–480 BC) in Ionia. The first of the great Ionic temples was the Temple of Hera on Samos, built about 570–560 BC by the architect Rhoikos. It stood for only a decade before it was leveled by an earthquake. A longer-lasting 6th century Ionic temple was the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The Parthenon, although it conforms mainly to the Doric order, also has some Ionic elements. A more purely Ionic mode to be seen on the Athenian Acropolis is exemplified in the Erechtheum.  Following the conquests of Alexander the Great in the east, a few examples of the Ionic order can be found as far as Pakistan with the Jandial temple near Taxila. Several examples of capitals displaying Ionic influences can be seen as far away as Patna, India, especially with the Pataliputra capital, dated to the 3rd century BC, and seemingly derived from the design of the Ionic anta capital, or the Sarnath capital, which has been described as "Perso-Ionic", or "quasi-Ionic".  Vitruvius, a practicing architect who worked in the time of Augustus, reports that the Doric column had its initial basis in the proportions of the male body, while Ionic columns took on a "slenderness" inspired by the female body. Though he does not name his source for such a self-conscious and "literary" approach, it must be in traditions passed on from Hellenistic architects, such as Hermogenes of Priene, the architect of a famed temple of Artemis at Magnesia on the Meander in Lydia (now Turkey).  Renaissance architectural theorists took his hints to interpret the Ionic order as matronly in comparison to the Doric order, though not as wholly feminine as the Corinthian order. The Ionic is a natural order for post-Renaissance libraries and courts of justice, learned and civilized. Because no treatises on classical architecture survive earlier than that of Vitruvius, identification of such "meaning" in architectural elements as it was understood in the 5th and 4th centuries BC remains tenuous, though during the Renaissance it became part of the conventional "speech" of classicism.  From the 17th century onwards, a much admired and copied version of Ionic was that which could be seen in the Temple of Fortuna Virilis in Rome, first clearly presented in a detailed engraving in Antoine Desgodetz, "Les edifices antiques de Rome" (Paris 1682).

The Ionic order is one of the three canonic orders of classical architecture, the other two being the Doric and the Corinthian. There are two lesser orders: the Tuscan (a plainer Doric), and the rich variant of Corinthian called the composite order. Of the three classical canonic orders, the Ionic order has the narrowest columns.

Iónský sloh anebo iónský styl či iónský řád (v širším smyslu) byl jeden z architektonických stylů starověkého Řecka. Pojem iónský řád v užším smyslu označuje jen sloupový řád tohoto slohu, tedy ionský sloup.


Fundamental differences between J# and Java.

Java and J# use the same general syntax but there are non-Java conventions in J# to support the.NET environment. For example, to use.NET "properties" with a standard JavaBean class, it is necessary to prefix getter and setter methods with the Javadoc-like annotation: ...and change the corresponding private variable name to be different from the suffix of the getXxx/setXxx names.  J# does not compile Java-language source code to Java bytecode (.class files), and does not support Java applet development or the ability to host applets directly in a web browser, although it does provide a wrapper called Microsoft J# Browser Controls for hosting them as ActiveX objects. Finally, Java Native Interface (JNI) and raw native interface (RNI) are substituted with P/Invoke; J# does not support remote method invocation (RMI).  JavaWorld said: "J#'s interface to the.NET framework is solid, but not as seamless as C#. In particular, J# code cannot define new.NET attributes, events, value types, or delegates. J# can make use of these language constructs if they are defined in an assembly written in another language, but its inability to define new ones limits J#'s reach and interoperability compared to other.NET languages."  Contrariwise, Microsoft documentation for Visual Studio 2005 details the definition of.NET delegates, events, and value types directly in J#.

Future of J#.

In January 2007, Microsoft announced:  A link to download Visual J# 2005 Express Edition is no longer available from Microsoft's website  Visual J# is out of mainstream support but "Visual J# 2.0 Redistributable Second Edition released in 2007, with support continuing through to 2017 (5 years mainstream and 5 years extended support) on EN-US locales." Support for the Visual J# Version 2.0 Redistributable Package Second Edition was discontinued on October 10, 2017.

Visual J# (pronounced "jay-sharp") is an implementation of the J# programming language that was a transitional language for programmers of Java and Visual J++ languages, so they could use their existing knowledge and applications with the.NET Framework. It was introduced in 2002 and discontinued in 2007, with support for the final release of the product continuing until October 2017.

J# (vyslovované anglicky jako J Sharp, ) je programovací jazyk z rodiny jazyků.NET, vyvíjený společností Microsoft jako varianta k multisystémovému jazyku Java. J# je založený na dřívější variantě J++, od nějž se neliší nijak výrazně. Syntaxe je obdobná programovacím jazykům C# a Java a s využitím příslušných knihoven (vjslib.dll) je možné implementovat standardní knihovny Javy a pracovat s nimi v rámci jazyka J#.


Background.

The immediate cause of the United States' entry into World War I in April 1917 was the German announcement of renewed unrestricted submarine warfare and the subsequent sinking of ships with Americans on board. But President Wilson's war aims went beyond the defense of maritime interests. In his War Message to Congress, Wilson declared that the United States' objective was "to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world." In several speeches earlier in the year, Wilson sketched out his vision of an end to the war that would bring a  President Wilson subsequently initiated a secret series of studies named the Inquiry, primarily focused on Europe, and carried out by a group in New York which included geographers, historians and political scientists; the group was directed by Colonel House. Their job was to study Allied and American policy in virtually every region of the globe and analyze economic, social, and political facts likely to come up in discussions during the peace conference. The group produced and collected nearly 2,000 separate reports and documents plus at least 1,200 maps. The studies culminated in a speech by Wilson to Congress on January 8, 1918, wherein he articulated America's long-term war objectives. The speech was the clearest expression of intention made by any of the belligerent nations, and it projected Wilson's progressive domestic policies into the international arena.

Speech.

The speech, known as the Fourteen Points, was developed from a set of diplomatic points by Wilson and territorial points drafted by the Inquiry's general secretary, Walter Lippmann, and his colleagues, Isaiah Bowman, Sidney Mezes, and David Hunter Miller. Lippmann's draft territorial points were a direct response to the secret treaties of the European Allies, which Lippmann had been shown by Secretary of War Newton D. Baker. Lippmann's task, according to House, was "to take the secret treaties, analyze the parts which were tolerable, and separate them from those which were regarded as intolerable, and then develop a position which conceded as much to the Allies as it could, but took away the poison... It was all keyed upon the secret treaties."  In the speech, Wilson directly addressed what he perceived as the causes for the world war by calling for the abolition of secret treaties, a reduction in armaments, an adjustment in colonial claims in the interests of both native peoples and colonists, and freedom of the seas. Wilson also made proposals that would ensure world peace in the future. For example, he proposed the removal of economic barriers between nations, the promise of self-determination for national minorities, and a world organization that would guarantee the "political independence and territorial integrity [of] great and small states alike"—a League of Nations.  Though Wilson's idealism pervaded the Fourteen Points, he also had more practical objectives in mind. He hoped to keep Russia in the war by convincing the Bolsheviks that they would receive a better peace from the Allies, to bolster Allied morale, and to undermine German war support. The address was well received in the United States and Allied nations and even by Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, as a landmark of enlightenment in international relations. Wilson subsequently used the Fourteen Points as the basis for negotiating the Treaty of Versailles, which ended the war.

Text.

In his speech to Congress, President Wilson declared fourteen points which he regarded as the only possible basis of an enduring peace.:

Reaction.

Allies.

Wilson at first considered abandoning his speech after Lloyd George delivered a speech outlining British war aims, many of which were similar to Wilson's aspirations, at Caxton Hall on January 5, 1918. Lloyd George stated that he had consulted leaders of "the Great Dominions overseas" before making his speech, so it would appear that Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Newfoundland were in broad agreement.  Wilson was persuaded by his adviser Colonel House to go ahead, and Wilson's speech overshadowed Lloyd George's and is better remembered by posterity.  The speech was made without prior coordination or consultation with Wilson's counterparts in Europe. Clemenceau, upon hearing of the Fourteen Points, was said to have sarcastically proclaimed, "The good Lord had only ten!" (). As a major public statement of war aims, it became the basis for the terms of the German surrender at the end of the First World War. After the speech, Colonel House worked to secure the acceptance of the Fourteen Points by Entente leaders. On October 16, 1918, President Woodrow Wilson and Sir William Wiseman, the head of British intelligence in America, had an interview. This interview was one reason why the German government accepted the Fourteen Points and the stated principles for peace negotiations.  The report was made as negotiation points, and the Fourteen Points were later accepted by France and Italy on November 1, 1918. Britain later signed off on all of the points except the freedom of the seas. The United Kingdom also wanted Germany to make reparation payments for the war, and thought that should be added to the Fourteen Points. The speech was delivered 10 months before the Armistice with Germany and became the basis for the terms of the German surrender, as negotiated at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.

Central Powers.

The speech was widely disseminated as an instrument of Allied propaganda and was translated into many languages for global dissemination. Copies were also dropped behind German lines, to encourage the Central Powers to surrender in the expectation of a just settlement. Indeed, in a note sent to Wilson by Prince Maximilian of Baden, the German imperial chancellor, in October 1918 requested an immediate armistice and peace negotiations on the basis of the Fourteen Points.

United States.

Theodore Roosevelt, in a January 1919 article titled, "The League of Nations", published in "Metropolitan Magazine", warned: "If the League of Nations is built on a document as high-sounding and as meaningless as the speech in which Mr. Wilson laid down his fourteen points, it will simply add one more scrap to the diplomatic waste paper basket. Most of these fourteen points... would be interpreted... to mean anything or nothing."  Senator William Borah after 1918 wished "this treacherous and treasonable scheme" of the League of Nations to be "buried in hell" and promised that if he had his way it would be "20,000 leagues under the sea".

Treaty of Versailles.

President Wilson became physically ill at the beginning of the Paris Peace Conference, giving way to French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau to advance demands that were substantially different from Wilson's Fourteen Points. Clemenceau viewed Germany as having unfairly attained an economic victory over France because of the heavy damage German forces dealt to France's industries even during the German retreat, and he expressed dissatisfaction with France's allies at the peace conference.  Notably, Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles, which would become known as the War Guilt Clause, was seen by the Germans as assigning full responsibility for the war and its damages on Germany; however, the same clause was included in all peace treaties and historian Sally Marks has noted that only German diplomats saw it as assigning responsibility for the war. The Allies would initially assess 269 billion marks in reparations. In 1921, this figure was established at 192 billion marks. However, only a fraction of the total had to be paid. The figure was designed to look imposing and show the public that Germany was being punished, but it also recognized what Germany could not realistically pay.  Germany's ability and willingness to pay that sum continues to be a topic of debate among historians. Germany was also denied an air force, and the German army was not to exceed 100,000 men.  The text of the Fourteen Points had been widely distributed in Germany as propaganda prior to the end of the war and was well known by the Germans. The differences between this document and the final Treaty of Versailles fueled great anger in Germany. German outrage over reparations and the War Guilt Clause is viewed as a likely contributing factor to the rise of National Socialism. By the time of the Armistice of 11th November 1918, foreign armies had only entered Germany's prewar borders twice : at the Battle of Tannenberg in the East Prussia, and following the Battle of Mulhouse, the settlement of the French army in the Thann valley. These were both in 1914. This lack of any Allied incursions at the end of the War contributed to the popularization of the stab-in-the-back myth in Germany after the war.  Wilson was awarded the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize for his peace-making efforts.

The Fourteen Points was a statement of principles for peace that was to be used for peace negotiations in order to end World War I. The principles were outlined in a January 8, 1918, speech on war aims and peace terms to the United States Congress by President Woodrow Wilson. But his main Allied colleagues (Georges Clemenceau of France, David Lloyd George of the United Kingdom, and Vittorio Orlando of Italy) were skeptical of the applicability of Wilsonian idealism.

Čtrnáct bodů prezidenta Wilsona byl program amerického prezidenta Woodrowa Wilsona vyřčený na zasedání Kongresu 8. ledna 1918. Týkal se mezinárodního uspořádání světa po první světové válce z hlediska postoje Spojených států.