Re-Death of Hercules Graphics

Guilliemot Group is ending its line of Hercules brand of graphics boards. The reason is lack of profit. As the company wrote in today's press release:

"The Group has therefore elected to progressively withdraw from the graphics board and monitor markets, which have been producing very weak gross margins, in order to mobilize all of its resources towards the development of markets with strong potential."

This is the second death for Hercules Graphics boards, a once-proud brandname in the personal computer industry. During the 1980s, Hercules was the most successful graphics board company.

When IBM first introduced its PC in 1981, it offered two graphics boards: monochrome and color. The MDA (monochrome display adapter) was more popular because: (1) it was cheaper than color; and (2) the accompanying monochrome monitor was cheaper than color. Price was an issue, because business computers were very expensive in the early days: my first computer system (a Victor 9000 with Epson MX printer, which I still have) was the equivalent of $30,000 in today's purchasing power.

If you wanted graphics, even something as simple as a pie chart, you had to buy the CGA (color graphics adaptor: 320x240 at 4 colors or 640x480 at 2 colors), because MDA didn't do graphics. That's where Hercules filled the niche. They figured out how to get the IBM PC display graphics on a monochrome board, at a resolution higher than any of IBM's graphics boards -- fulfulling the the desired need of "hi-res" graphics on a (relatively) low-cost system. The HGC (Hercules graphics card) became so popular that all graphics software, including CAD, provided at least two drivers: one for the IBM CGA, and one for the Hercules HGC.

The company was successful, but then sat on its success. When it finally brought out a color graphics board, it was too little, too late -- as I recall from when I reviewed it at CADalyst magazine. The VGA (video graphics array: 16 colors at 640x480) and XGA (extended graphics array: 1024x768) boards, introduced by IBM in 1987, and still the standards to this day, blew away proprietary solutions. Hercules continued for a few more years, trying to find a place in the high-end market using TI's TIGA chipsets [anyone remember those?] and adding video capabilities. I wrote documentation for their AutoCAD driver. In 1991, the company ran controversial ads featuring an undressed Hercules-style of male.

After the companywent under, Guilliemot Group of France bought the brand name. Like most other graphics boards today, they no longer design their own graphics chips, but assemble boards based on GPUs from ATI and nVideo. The current Hercules 3D Prophet 9800 XT Classic board uses the chip set from ATI.

The Hercules brand name lives on for a series of music-related products: DJ consoles, MIDI interface cards, and so on.

Comments

[pdq]

Some trivia about Hercules. The company is named for Hercules, CA where the founders started it in a garage. Herculese CA in turn is named for the Hercules Poweder company that had an explosives plant there before there was any significant population there. (It blew up during WWII).