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| Industry | Computer peripherals |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1982 |
| Founder |
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| Defunct | 1998 |
| Fate | Acquired by Guillemot Corporation |
Hercules Computer Technology, Inc. was a manufacturer of computer peripherals for PCs and Macs founded in 1982.
Hercules was formed in 1982 in Hercules, California, [1] by Van Suwannukul and Kevin Jenkins and was one of the major graphics card companies of the 1980s. Its biggest products were the MDA-compatible Hercules Graphics Card (HGC) and Hercules Graphics Card Plus (HGC+) and the associated standard, which was widely copied and survived into the 1990s. [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
The Hercules Graphics Card included a "Centronics compatible" parallel printer port, the same as the IBM Monochrome Display and Printer Adapter board that the card was based on. [7] The company also produced CGA compatible cards, and with the unsuccessful Hercules InColor Card, it tried to go head-to-head with the Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA). [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15]
After low sales with InColor, Hercules stopped making its own graphics core and bought graphics chipsets from other manufacturers. The company name gradually declined through the 1990s while graphics chipsets firms such as Tseng Labs, S3 Graphics, 3Dfx, nVidia and ATI Technologies became popular, but Hercules sales of graphic cards were still at US$20 million in 1998. An acquisition of Hercules by German graphics card maker ELSA fell through in 1998 after the companies could not agree on terms.
The Hercules brand was acquired by the French-Canadian based Guillemot Corporation for $1.8 million. [16] In 2000 Hercules became the brand name for Guillemot 3D Prophet graphic cards, based on nVIDIA chipsets, switching to ATI Technologies chipsets in 2002.
Also in 2000, Guillemot introduced a new sound card, Game Theater XP, with the Hercules brand name, and Hercules gradually became the computer peripherals brand in Guillemot Corporation.
In 2004, Guillemot announced it would cease to produce graphics cards. Within the Guillemot group, computer peripherals (audio interfaces, speakers, webcams, networking) are designed by the Hercules division and given the Hercules brand, while game peripherals are designed by the Thrustmaster division and receive the Thrustmaster brand.
In 2010, the Hercules brand was used on computer speakers, computer DJ controllers, webcams and wireless networking peripherals.
Hercules turnover was €40.9 million (US$56.5 million) in 2010.
The Hercules Graphics Card (HGC) is a computer graphics controller formerly made by Hercules Computer Technology, Inc. that combines IBM's text-only MDA display standard with a bitmapped graphics mode, also offering a parallel printer port. This allows the HGC to offer both high-quality text and graphics from a single card.
The GeForce 256 is the original release in Nvidia's "GeForce" product-line. Announced on August 31, 1999 and released on October 11, 1999, the GeForce 256 improves on its predecessor by increasing the number of fixed pixel pipelines, offloading host geometry calculations to a hardware transform and lighting (T&L) engine, and adding hardware motion compensation for MPEG-2 video. It offered a notably large leap in 3D PC gaming performance and was the first fully Direct3D 7-compliant 3D accelerator.
ATI Technologies Inc., commonly called ATI, was a Canadian semiconductor technology corporation based in Markham, Ontario, that specialized in the development of graphics processing units and chipsets. Founded in 1985, the company listed publicly in 1993 and was acquired by AMD in 2006. As a major fabrication-less or fabless semiconductor company, ATI conducted research and development in-house and outsourced the manufacturing and assembly of its products. With the decline and eventual bankruptcy of 3dfx in 2000, ATI and its chief rival Nvidia emerged as the two dominant players in the graphics processors industry, eventually forcing other manufacturers into niche roles.
3dfx Interactive, Inc. was an American computer hardware company headquartered in San Jose, California, founded in 1994, that specialized in the manufacturing of 3D graphics processing units, and later, video cards. It was a pioneer in the field from the late 1990s to 2000.
The RIVA TNT2 is a graphics processing unit manufactured by Nvidia starting in early 1999. The chip is codenamed "NV5" because it is the 5th graphics chip design by Nvidia, succeeding the RIVA TNT (NV4). RIVA is an acronym for Real-time Interactive Video and Animation accelerator. The "TNT" suffix refers to the chip's ability to work on two texels at once. Nvidia removed RIVA from the name later in the chip's lifetime.
Tseng Laboratories, Inc. was a maker of graphics chips and controllers for IBM PC compatibles, based in Newtown, Pennsylvania, and founded by Jack Hsiao Nan Tseng.
S3 Graphics, Ltd. was an American computer graphics company. The company sold the Trio, ViRGE, Savage, and Chrome series of graphics processors. Struggling against competition from 3dfx Interactive, ATI and Nvidia, it merged with hardware manufacturer Diamond Multimedia in 1999. The resulting company renamed itself to SONICblue Incorporated, and, two years later, the graphics portion was spun off into a new joint effort with VIA Technologies. The new company focused on the mobile graphics market. VIA Technologies' stake in S3 Graphics was purchased by HTC in 2011.
Savage was a product-line of PC graphics chipsets designed by S3.
Diamond Multimedia is an American company that specializes in many forms of multimedia technology. They have produced graphics cards, motherboards, modems, sound cards and MP3 players; however, the company began with the production of the TrackStar, a PC add-on card which emulated Apple II computers. They were one of the major players in the 2D and early 3D graphics card competition throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.
AMD CrossFire is a brand name for the multi-GPU technology by Advanced Micro Devices, originally developed by ATI Technologies. The technology allows up to four GPUs to be used in a single computer to improve graphics performance.
The ATI Rage is a series of graphics chipsets developed by ATI Technologies offering graphical user interface (GUI) 2D acceleration, video acceleration, and 3D acceleration developed by ATI Technologies. It is the successor to the ATI Mach series of 2D accelerators.
Voodoo3 was a series of computer gaming video cards manufactured and designed by 3dfx Interactive. It was the successor to the company's high-end Voodoo2 line and was based heavily upon the older Voodoo Banshee product. Voodoo3 was announced at COMDEX '98 and arrived on store shelves in early 1999. The Voodoo3 line was the first product manufactured by the combined STB Systems and 3dfx.
AMD 580 chipset series is a computer chipset series designed by the AMD Graphics Product Group, for the AMD processors. It was designed for usage with ATI's CrossFire Multi GPU Technology, with both PCI Express slots running at x16 lanes each.
Club 3D, founded in 1997 as Colour Power, is a Dutch brand of video cards and digital multimedia products such as TV tuner cards and digital sound cards for PCs, featuring AMD graphics chipsets and technologies.
The Asus Eee Top is a touch screen all-in-one desktop computer designed by Asus and released in November 2008. Its motherboard employs Splashtop technology called "ExpressGate" by Asus.
The Hercules InColor Card (GB222) is an IBM PC compatible 8-bit ISA graphics controller card released in April 1987 by Hercules Computer Technology, Inc. It supported a fixed hardware palette of 64 colours, with the ability to display 720 × 350 with 16 colours on an EGA monitor and software redefinable fonts.
The ATI Wonder series represents some of the first video card add-on products for IBM Personal Computers and compatibles introduced by ATI Technologies in the mid to late 1980s. These cards were unique at the time as they offered the end user a considerable amount of value by combining support for multiple graphics standards into a single card. The VGA Wonder series added additional value with the inclusion of a bus mouse port, which normally required the installation of a dedicated Microsoft Mouse adapter.
The Voodoo2 is a set of three specialized 3D graphics chips on a single chipset setup, made by 3dfx. It was released in February 1998 as a replacement for the original Voodoo Graphics chipset. The card runs at a chipset clock rate of 90 MHz and uses 100 MHz EDO DRAM, and is available for the PCI interface. The Voodoo2 comes in two models, one with 8 MB RAM and one with 12 MB RAM. The 8 MB card has 2 MB of memory per texture mapping unit (TMU) vs. 4 MB on the 12 MB model. The 4 MB framebuffer on both cards support a maximum screen resolution of 800 × 600, while the increased texture memory on the 12 MB card allows more detailed textures. Some boards with 8 MB can be upgraded to 12 MB with an additional daughter board.
