If you’ve been around long enough to remember a time before modern-day GPUs were a thing, the name “Hercules Graphics Card” (HGCC might ring a bell. It quietly revolutionized PC graphics back in the early 80s for businesses, ushering in a new era of innovation in display hardware; you could say, Hercules walked so Nvidia and ATI could run. Even though it looks primitive by today’s standards, it’s always interesting to look back at how impactful old technology was when even the concept of a GPU was abstract. Let’s go on a bit of a retrospective journey, courtesy of The 8-Bit Guy on YouTube, who explains not only the legend of Hercules in his video but also the inner workings of the actual hardware.
Before modern GPUs were capable of true graphical rendering, IBM PCs dominated the corporate world with unmatched credibility. Businesses essentially only needed to sift through spreadsheets and charts, handle basic accounting, and process large amounts of text in documents. For this, “graphics” weren’t required; only numbers and letters were needed, which were far simpler to display. Think of it like a printer; seldom is one used for actual pictures with precise details, and more so for just text.
How the Hercules Graphics Card Worked – YouTube 
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At the time, IBM PCs offered two display options: Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) and Monochrome Display Adapter (MDA). The former could show color but had a max resolution of 640×200, so text looked coarse. Comparatively, the MDA was much sharper at 720×350 but was limited to monochrome, and incapable of displaying graphics whatsoever… which made it cheaper and, thus, more widespread. In comes the Hercules Graphics Card, possessing the best of both worlds.
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It combined text-only MDA processing with the pixel-addressable graphics mode introduced by CGA, preserving the quality of both. You’d get the same sharp text with backward compatibility for existing MDA slots and monitors, alongside high-res graphics at 720×348 pixels. Not only that, but it also introduced a 32KB frame buffer — effectively an early form of VRAM — that allowed programs to directly address video memory, which no IBM display adapter had done before.