Procrastinato said:
Michael Abrash is a god, largely responsible for the graphical prowess of iD's early games, and also for a large portion of modern DirectX concepts. John Carmack is his buddy, who isn't half bad as a programmer himself.
Get it right, guys. Carmack is tall because... shoulders of giants. Okay okay, he knows some stuff too.
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From Wikipedia:
Before getting into technical writing, Abrash was a game programmer, having written his first commercial game in 1982, Space Strike (unrelated to the massively multiplayer game of the same name) for the IBM PC (under DOS). Other games he wrote were Cosmic Crusader (1982) and Big Top (1983) for the same system. After working at Microsoft on graphics and assembly code for Windows NT 3.1, he returned to the game industry in the mid-1990s to work on Quake for id Software. Some of the technology behind Quake is documented in Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book. After Quake was released, Abrash returned to Microsoft to work on natural language research, then moved to the Xbox team, until 2001. In 2002, Abrash went to work for RAD Game Tools, where he co-wrote the Pixomatic software renderer, which emulates the functionality of a DirectX 7-level graphics card and is used as the software renderer in such games as Unreal Tournament 2004.
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Now, I don't know how much of what is said in that wiki-article is true (since there were no sources), but I think you're trying to pull a fast one on us. The sentence "largely responisble for the graphical prowess of iD's early games" is misleading if he in fact only worked on Quake.
I feel it's safe to say that Mr. Abrash is a fairly intelligent bloke, with an impressive resumé, but that doesn't have very much to do with the impressiveness of Carmacks resumé.
