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Famous graphics chips: EGA to VGA

This is the third in a series of short articles about graphics chips, controllers, and processors, that changed the course of the computer graphics (CG) industry. When IBM introduced the Intel 8080-based Personal Computer (PC) in 1981, it was equipped with an add-in board (AIB) called the Color Graphics Adaptor (CGA). The CGA AIB had 16 kilobytes of video memory ...

Jon Peddie

This is the third in a series of short articles about graphics chips, controllers, and processors, that changed the course of the computer graphics (CG) industry. When IBM introduced the Intel 8080-based Personal Computer (PC) in 1981, it was equipped with an add-in board (AIB) called the Color Graphics Adaptor (CGA). The CGA AIB had 16 kilobytes of video memory and could drive either an NTSC-TV monitor or a dedicated 4-bit RGB CRT monitor, such as the IBM 5153 color display. It didn’t have a dedicated controller and was assembled using a half dozen LSI chips. The large chip in
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