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Video Card History
John Mathers writes "While searching the net for information on old Voodoo Video Cards, I came across this fabulous Video Card History article up at FastSilicon.com. It's nice to see that someone has taken the time to look back on the Video Cards that revolutionized the personal computer. Here's a quote "When 3dfx released their first card in October of 1996, it hit the computer world like a right cross to the face. That card was called Voodoo. This new card held the door open for video game development. The Voodoo card was simply a 3D graphics accelerator, which was plugged into a regular 2D video card; known as piggy backing."
What? No mention of the IBM CGA card that you could destroy by putting it into video modes it didn't support? One of the few circustances in which PC hardware could be broken by software. That in itself should be worth mentioning!
OTOH, most of the peers of the early PCs had total crap text modes; they couldn't do what the PC could do. (Yes, this includes the Apple. There were no Macs yet.) This is one of the major reasons the PC ended up dominating; text mode was simply more important. Remember that back then most all business use and a good amount of home use was in text mode (word processing, spreadsheets, financial, etc.).
The original IBM PC and its clones usually came with a specially designed monochrome text mode monitor with relatively high resolution (720 x something, no dot pitch to worry about). The monitors had a very long persistence phosphor that totally eliminated flicker. The monochrome text-mode video cards had a very nice serif font stored in their ROMs. IBM's intent was to recreate the feel of their expensive dedicated mainframe text terminals.
This setup had a very high quality feel, and you could stare at it all day without getting eye strain. Early color graphics monitors, OTOH, were horrible at showing text. This was compounded by the crappy fonts that were shipped with most early graphic OSes. This made most of the PC's early competitors pretty useless for doing long stretches of serious work.
IBM's attempt to provide color graphics did suck big time [*]. Originally, you had to buy two graphics adapters and two separate monitors to get text and graphics on the same machine. One of Compaq's claims to fame was getting the patent on unifying the PCs high-quality text mode and its graphics modes on a single graphics adapter and monitor.
[*] The original 16-bit color mode of the EGA cards and VGA cards must have been designed by somebody who was high on crack. You can't get at the pixel memory without setting up a bewildering array of registers that control mandatory and mostly non-useful logic operations on your bits. The memory is accessed as 4 independent planes, so you have to unnaturally slice every pixel up into individual bits and have a PhD in boolean logic to get them on the screen as you intended. It easily could take a newbie a whole day of reading manuals and hacking before they could get a single white dot on the screen.