From a SGI magazine article Open Source 3D Tools - POWERING A WAVE OF VISUALIZATION:
"Blender3D (www.blender3d.org) is an up-and-coming open source modeling package. While it lacks many of the features of packages from market leaders such as SoftImage and Maya from Alias, it has a strong and evolving feature set and is used in many fields beyond its gaming focus. It also has an interesting history.
In 1995 a Netherlands-based gaming company, NeoGeo, started to rewrite a modeling tool used internally. In 1998 this effort was spun-out, NaN (Not a Number), to accelerate progress on the rewrite. NaN went through several incarnations before closing down in 2002. The founder of NaN, Ton Roosendaal, worked to raise money to buy the source code from the insolvent company with a commitment to open source it, which was achieved by October 2002."
http://www.sgi.com/products/visualizati ... _tools.pdf
Blender in SGI article
Moderators: jesterKing, stiv
The Blender history is explained on the site: http://www.blender3d.org/cms/History.53.0.html