IBM Monochrome Display Adapter - Competing Adapters

Competing Adapters

There were two commonly available competing display adapters:

• For PC users requiring bitmapped graphics and/or color, IBM offered its Color Graphics Adapter (CGA, also CGA card), launched at the same time as their MDA. The lower resolution of its text mode characters (as compared to MDA) and absence of a printer port, which was included on the original MDA card, made CGA cards less attractive for business use.
• Introduced in 1982, the non-IBM Hercules Graphics Card (also HGC) offered both an MDA compatible high resolution text mode and a monochrome graphics mode. It could address individual pixels and display a black and white picture of 720×348 pixels. This resolution was better than even the highest monochrome resolution CGA cards could offer. Thus, even without a color capability of any kind, the Hercules adapter's offer of monochrome graphics without sacrificing MDA-equivalent text quality made it a more desirable choice for many.