Found these here https://books.google.de/books?id=Jzo-qeUtauoC&pg=PT7&dq=%22g... Computerworld magazine 1976 VGI called a graphics processing unit (GPU)

> 3400 is a direct-writing system capable of displaying 3-D graphics and alphanumerics with speeds up to 20.000....

It's not what I would call a GPU, but I think it's hard to draw lines when it comes to naming things and defining things.

If anyone else wants to try to find the real GPU

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22gpu%22+graphics+processin...

"The TMS34010, developed by Texas Instruments and released in 1986, was the first programmable graphics processor integrated circuit. While specialized graphics hardware existed earlier, such as blitters, the TMS34010 chip is a microprocessor which includes graphics-oriented instructions, making it a combination of a CPU and what would later be called a GPU."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMS34010

And they weren't alone in the history of graphics hardware.

the "old way" was to engineer a bit of silicon for each one of those things, custom-like. problem was how much silicon to give to teach feature, it almost has to be fine-tuned to each individual game, a problem

So nvidia comes up with the idea to sort of have a pool of generic compute units, each of which can do T&L, or shading, etc. Now the problem of fine-tuning to a game is solved. but also now you have a mini compute array that can do math fast, a general-purpose unit of processing (GPU-OP), which was a nod from NVIDIA to the gaming community (OP - overpowered)

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1985-02/1985_02_BY...

  > Two years later, Nvidia introduced the GPU. He [Curtis Priem] recalls that
  > Dan Vivoli, Nvidia's marketing person, came up with the term GPU, for 
  > graphics processing. "I thought that was very arrogant of him because how 
  > dare this little company take on Intel, which had the CPU," he said.