The Orchid Graphics Adapter is a

graphics board A graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics adapter, VGA card/VGA, video adapter, display adapter, or mistakenly GPU) is an expansion card which generates a feed of output images to a display device, such as a computer mon ...

for

IBM PC compatible IBM PC compatible computers are similar to the original IBM PC, XT, and AT, all from computer giant IBM, that are able to use the same software and expansion cards. Such computers were referred to as PC clones, IBM clones or IBM PC clones ...

computers, released in 1982 by

Orchid Technology Orchid Technology was a privately held company founded by Le Nhon Bui in 1982. History 1982 to 1984 The company's original flagship product was its PCNet card, a 1 megabit-per-second LAN (networking) card for IBM PCs and clones. Notably, the acro ...

. It was intended to provide high resolution (at the time) monochrome graphic abilities to computers limited to text displays. It was aimed at the business market and one of the three first third party graphic boards for PCs (the others being

Plantronics Colorplus The Plantronics Colorplus is a graphics card for IBM PC computers, first sold in 1982. It is a superset of the then-current CGA standard, using the same monitor standard and providing the same pixel resolutions. It was produced by Frederick Ele ...

and

Hercules Graphics Card The Hercules Graphics Card (HGC) is a computer graphics controller made by Hercules Computer Technology, Inc. that combines IBM's text-only MDA display standard with a bitmapped graphics mode. This allows the HGC to offer both high-quality text ...

). It offered a monochrome 720x350 pixel resolution and required an existing

MDA MDA, mda, or ''variation'', may refer to: Places * Moldova, a country in Europe with the ISO 3166-1 country code MDA Politics *Meghalaya Democratic Alliance (2018), ruling coalition government in the Indian State of Meghalaya led by National Pe ...

board to function. The board also offered an IBM PC joystick adapter. No software, other than GSX-86 and that supplied with the board ( ''Dr. Halo'' by

Media Cybernetics Roper Technologies, Inc. (formerly Roper Industries, Inc.) is an American diversified industrial company that produces engineered products for global niche markets. The company is headquartered in Sarasota, Florida. Roper provides a wide range ...

), offered support for the hardware. Graphic routines could be called from FORTRAN,

PASCAL Pascal, Pascal's or PASCAL may refer to: People and fictional characters * Pascal (given name), including a list of people with the name * Pascal (surname), including a list of people and fictional characters with the name ** Blaise Pascal, Frenc ...

IBM BASIC The IBM Personal Computer Basic, commonly shortened to IBM BASIC, is a programming language first released by IBM with the IBM Personal Computer, Model 5150 (IBM PC) in 1981. IBM released four different versions of the Microsoft BASIC interpre ...

Output capabilities

*720×350 monochrome graphics, pixel aspect ratio of 1:1.55.

References

Computer display standards Graphics cards Monochrome Display Adapter Computer-related introductions in 1982 {{compu-hardware-stub

Output capabilities

See also

References