Number Nine Visual Technology

~ the eulogy ~

Andrew Najda and Stan Bialek started Number Nine Computer Corporation in Massachusetts in 1982, first in Cambridge by one account and later based in Lexington. The first product was an accelerator board for the Apple II. By 1983 the company had moved to PC graphics and it stayed there for the rest of its life, at the expensive end, selling to people who cared what a screen looked like rather than what a game ran at.

The name came from the Beatles and so did almost everything else. Product lines were called Revolution, Imagine, Pepper and Ticket to Ride. Model numbers were prefixed with #9. When you powered a machine on, the card's video BIOS put a fragment of the matching song on the screen before the operating system loaded, which meant a piece of hardware greeted you with a lyric every single morning. Nobody asked them to do that.

The firsts were real. Number Nine shipped the first 256-color card and the first card capable of 16.8 million colors, and in 1994 it announced the first fully 128-bit graphics processor. These were not consumer parts. The TIGA-based boards of the late 1980s ran from around $995 to $2,495 and the early Revolution series ran from $1,995 to $3,995, which is desktop-publishing and CAD money rather than something a teenager saved up for.

By the time I was buying parts, the only question anyone asked about a graphics card in turkey was how many frames it got, and the answers were Voodoo boards and TNTs costing a small fraction of what a #9 card had ever cost. Number Nine model names existed for me in magazines and nowhere else. Later, when hardware lists in forum signatures were a normal thing to maintain and mine was one of them, the company had already been sold off and shut down, so there was never a version of this where owning one would have meant anything to anyone I was talking to.

~ the dossier ~

~ the imagine 128 ~

The Imagine 128 was announced at Comdex in Las Vegas in november 1994, and the number was not marketing arithmetic. The processor was 128-bit and so was the whole path out to memory. Competitors at the same show were announcing 64-bit parts. Number Nine went public the following year on the strength of it, and the Imagine 128-II arrived in 1995 with a VLIW core behind a 256-bit rendering engine.

There was one gap in the middle of all that specification, and it was the only gap that turned out to matter. The original Imagine 128 had essentially no hardware for 3D. The company had built the fastest, widest 2D engine anyone could buy in 1994, at the exact moment the question stopped being how fast a window redrew.

~ what it refused to build ~

The response came late and never sounded like the company believed in it. Ticket to Ride added a floating point setup engine and the usual 3D feature checklist, and Ticket to Ride IV added anti-aliasing and a proper rendering pipeline. Meanwhile 3dfx had shipped Voodoo, and the vocabulary of the entire market had changed to frames per second in a first person shooter. Number Nine's own marketing was still about image quality, which was true and no longer what anyone was buying.

Two artifacts from the end tell it better than the sales figures. The Revolution IV-FP carried an OpenLDI connector for Silicon Graphics' 1600SW flat panel, one of only a handful of cards that could drive that monitor, and it held a premium on the used market for years after the company was gone because the monitor outlived its maker too. And the last AGP card Number Nine ever shipped had an Nvidia GPU on it. A graphics chip company selling somebody else's chip has already conceded the argument.

~ the sale ~

On 20 december 1999 Number Nine announced a letter of intent for S3 to buy substantially all of its assets and intellectual property. S3 was a competitor, and also the supplier whose chips had sat on Number Nine's cheaper card lines all through the 1990s, so the company was absorbed by a firm it had spent a decade both fighting and buying from. The acquisition completed by the middle of 2000 and Number Nine ceased operations, seventeen years after the Apple II board.

In 2002 two former engineers, James Macleod and Francis Bruno, formed Silicon Spectrum and licensed the old Number Nine graphics technology back from S3 to implement in programmable logic. The designs had a second life as FPGA cores for buyers who needed a known, documented 2D engine rather than the fastest one.

~ the site that outlived the company ~

After the doors closed, a former employee kept the Number Nine website running on his own. Drivers stayed downloadable and the support forum stayed open, with a volunteer enthusiast answering questions on it for the last two and a half years, and other ex-employees checking in when something came up they could answer. That went on for five years past the end of the company. The site finally went off the air in march 2005 and the domain was picked up by an online gambling operation.

There is one more chapter. In 2013 Francis Bruno tried to crowdfund an open-source GPU derived from the Ticket To Ride IV design. It asked for $200,000 and raised $13,000, which is a comprehensive failure by any measure, and then in august 2014 the source was released under GPL3 anyway. The last graphics architecture Number Nine designed is sitting in public, readable, fourteen years after the company that built it stopped existing.

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