Hercules Computer Technology

» see hercules.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Van Suwannukul was a doctoral student at UC Berkeley in the early 1980s with a problem nobody at IBM had considered. He wanted to write his thesis in Thai, and the IBM PC could not do it. The Monochrome Display Adapter produced beautiful text but had its character set burned into a ROM, with no way to reach an individual pixel. CGA could reach pixels, at a resolution that turned Thai script into porridge. The machine could do sharp text or it could do graphics, and the choice was made when you bought the card.

So he built the thing himself. Hercules Computer Technology was founded in Berkeley in 1982 with Kevin Jenkins, and the Hercules Graphics Card went out that year at 499 dollars. It did everything MDA did on the cheap monochrome monitor people already owned. Then it added a 720 by 348 pixel-addressable graphics mode on the same board. IBM had shipped two cards that each solved half the problem, and a graduate student solved both halves for less than the price of either.

The software came to it. Lotus 1-2-3 shipped a Hercules driver, and so did AutoCAD. About half a million cards had sold by 1985. By March 1986 Hercules held half the monochrome graphics market and eighteen percent of the graphics card market overall, which for a company that was not IBM and was not a chipmaker is an extraordinary position to be standing in.

Then color got cheap. EGA in 1984 and VGA in 1987 made addressable color the default, and the reason to buy a monochrome card evaporated over about four years. Hercules answered with the InColor Card, an attempt to fight EGA on its own terms, and it went nowhere. The company spent the 1990s as a board assembler, putting other companies' chipsets on cards with its own name printed on them: Tseng Labs and S3 early, 3dfx and nVidia later. Graphics card sales were still around 20 million dollars in 1998, which is a real business for a board assembler and a long fall from having defined a standard.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ hercules mode ~

The card became a display standard, and standards are harder to kill than the companies that write them. Hercules mode stayed in software menus, in BIOS setup screens, and in the driver lists of programs written a decade after the hardware stopped being sold. It was the safe choice: if you did not know what was in the machine, you could ship a Hercules driver and be fairly confident something would appear on screen. That is how a 1982 card ends up being supported in 1995.

Turkey bought most of its computers second-hand through the years when this card mattered. Hardware arrived here after it had already been replaced somewhere else, and then stayed in service well past the point where anyone in California would have called it current. Amber and green monochrome screens were still doing daily work in Turkish offices and school labs deep into the 1990s. I was in middle school and thought of those machines as simply what a computer looked like, rather than as something out of date. The card had been obsolete in its home market for years by then and it did not matter, because obsolete in one country is standard equipment in another.

~ the funny part ~

ELSA, a PC peripherals maker in Aachen, bought Hercules in August 1998 for 8.5 million dollars and took on its debts. ELSA was in Chapter 11 the following year. The Hercules name went back on the market and Guillemot, the French company better known for Thrustmaster joysticks, announced on 29 October 1999 that it had bought the brand for about a fifth of what ELSA had paid twelve months earlier. Four names had now owned a trademark that was worth more than any of the assets attached to it.

~ what got buried with it ~

Guillemot used the name well. From 2000 the Hercules badge went on the 3D Prophet cards built around nVidia chips, then around ATI chips from 2002, and for a few years Hercules was a visible consumer graphics brand again. On 26 February 2004 Guillemot announced it was leaving the graphics card sector, citing gross margins it called very weak. The brand that started in a market for monochrome adapters left the graphics business for good, twenty-two years after inventing its own corner of it.

Hercules still exists as a label on audio interfaces and DJ controllers, which is a stranger fate than being forgotten. By 2010 it was turning over 40.9 million euros under Guillemot, more money than the original company ever handled, attached to products that have nothing to do with the 720 by 348 grid that made the name mean anything. Van Suwannukul got his thesis written.

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