HNNewShowAskJobs
Built with Tanstack Start
Learning a Bit of VGA(usebox.net)
10 points by speckx a day ago | 3 comments
  • wseqyrkua day ago

    Omg I was forgetting that we didn't say GPU back then, it was called VGA for some reason.

    • khedoros1a day ago |parent

      "Video card" was the more general word. "VGA" is one of the IBM video cards for PCs that later became a de facto standard, as its behavior was cloned by other companies. It's sometimes used descriptively to talk about the 640x480 resolution, or the DE-15 connector that remained a standard connection for analog video output on personal computers for a long time.

      • satiated_grue7 hours ago |parent

        There were a series of graphics adapters that started with the IBM PC:

        MDA = Monochrome Display Adapter (text only) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Monochrome_Display_Adapter

        CGA = Color Graphics Adapter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter

        EGA = Enhanced Graphics Adapter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Graphics_Adapter

        VGA = Video Graphics Array https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Graphics_Array

        With some others like the Hercules which was MDA upward-compatible and did graphics as well as text.

        They didn't really do any graphics "processing"; just displaying memory-mapped pixels in various formats.

        They were memory-mapped, and the MDA used a different memory block than the CGA/EGA/VGA, so you could have two separate monitors simultaneously, doing things lke running something like Turbo Debugger on the MDA text display.