Remembering Better Mono Graphics
No matter what kind of computer or phone you are reading this on, it probably has a graphics system that would have been a powerful computer on its own back in the 1980s.
When the IBM PC came out, you had two choices! the CGA card if you wanted color graphics, or the MDA if you wanted text. Today, you might think: no contest, we want color. But the MDA was cheaper and had significantly higher resolution, which was easier to read.
But as free markets do, companies see gaps and they fill them.
That’s how we got the Hercules card, which supported high-resolution monochrome text but also provided a graphics mode. The 8-bit Guy has a look at these old cards and how they were different from their peers.