Learning a Bit of VGA

usebox.net

10 points·speckx··3 comments

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

"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.

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.

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