https://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/8/ for the history of it. The original author is still unclear, but that article digs back as far as Gary Tarolli at 3dfx/SGI (by way of Carmack, Abrash, and Terje Mathison)
The man is a legend. I remember using his little set of DOS utilities (things like stuffit.com [2]) back in the early 1990s, which I got from a friend whose dad was a colleague of his at Hydro. They were all written in assembly language, and were superb little extensions to DOS.