DF Retro: The Story of Nvidia GeForce 256 - The Original 'GPU' [Sponsored]
Now this isn't technically the first GPU but I'll quote a user from gaf as he has a good explanation:
At the time, these cards were called just graphics accelerators. We were still at a time when most games could run in software mode. But if you had a card like these, those certain graphic's functions would be accelerated. Hence the name. nVidia was the first to market the term GPU. Mind you this was not a technical term, just a marketing gimmick. But it stuck, and now all graphics cards are called GPUs. And nVidia defined that only cards that had T&L could be called GPUs. Once again, this was just a marketing gimmick to differentiate the Geforce from the competition. ATI tried to counter with the term VPU, Visual processing Unit. But it never caught on.
