Hercules Graphics Card
IBM PC graphic adapter and display standard
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 HGC was very popular and became a widely supported de facto display standard on IBM PC compatibles. The HGC standard was used long after more technically capable systems had entered the market, especially on dual-monitor setups.
History
The Hercules Graphics Card was released to fill a gap in the IBM video product lineup. When the IBM Personal Computer was launched in 1981, it had two graphics cards available: the Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) and the Monochrome Display And Printer Adapter (MDA). CGA offers low-resolution (320 × 200) color graphics and medium-resolution (640 × 200) monochrome graphics, while MDA offers a sharper text mode (equivalent to 720 × 350) but has no per-pixel addressing modes and is limited to a fixed character set.
These adapters were quickly found to be inadequate by the market, creating a demand for a card that offers high-resolution graphics and text. The founder of Hercules Computer Technology, Van Suwannukul, created the Hercules Graphics Card so that he could work on his doctoral thesis on an IBM PC using the Thai alphabet, impossible with the low resolution of CGA or the fixed character set of MDA. It initially retailed in 1982 for $499.
The public source identifies “Hercules Graphics Card” as iBM PC graphic adapter and display standard. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Hercules, Graphics and Card.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q731861. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1981 and 1982.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hercules Graphics Card” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.