Matrox: The Canadian Startup That Powered NASA's Viking Displays
Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
Founded in 1976 by Lorne Trottier and Branko Matić, Matrox started with a $198 video RAM board and grew into a graphics powerhouse. Their early S-100 bus cards offered four times the resolution of rivals, and by 1978 their hardware was used in NASA's Viking mission ground control. The company later won a $72 million US Army contract and released the first 3D add-in card for PCs, the SM-640, though it failed due to a lack of software.
The ALT-256**2 is a fully tested, assembled, and burned-in interface card which provides capability for a complete graphic system at a fraction of the cost of any other commercial graphic system.
- littlecranky67
Lesser known feature was that the Matrox MGA/G200 chips were capable of delivering "sync on green" via regular VGA cable. This was a specialized format were VSync/HSync weren't transmitted over dedicated pins, but encoded into the green signal. This was required by some (then) older workstation monitors. In the early 2000s, I managed to get a 20" SGI workstation monitor for 20€ at ebay (at times where 20" monitors were above 1000€) - because no one could use them with regular PC hardware. Using a single "sync_on_green" flag in my XFree86.conf file, and it would work flawlessly on my linux box.
- zdw
When I was building a linux PC in the late 90's, I bought a Matrox Millenium with the memory expansion to 8MB which could do 1600x1200 with 24 bit color.
That was an awesome card for the time, and an incredibly stable analog signal, which Matrox was known for - other cards at the time would get fuzzy, shimmer, or have ringing / ghosting.
At the time, for good support you needed to *buy* an X11 server for accelerated graphics support. I forget which one I paid money for, but within a few years it wasn't necessary as open source had caught up.
- yankcrime
This brought back some really fond memories. Prior to the dawn of 3D accelerators from 3Dfx, Rendition, and eventually of course Nvidia, Matrox VGA cards were the absolute dogs bollocks when it came to gaming performance. They were the cards to have in your PC, especially the 220MHz RAMDAC version of the Millennium.
- abirkill
Founded in 1976 by Trottier and Matić, and according to the article and Wikipedia, since 2019 has been owned 100% by Trottier. There's no indication that the founders lost majority ownership at any time, and although they sold off one division in 2019, it appears that Trottier still owns 100% of the remaining two divisions today.
That's pretty remarkable, isn't it? How many tech companies that had a period of being a household name have lasted 50 years and are still majority-owned by all or some of the founders?
- foft
Memories! Back at university I got a G400 and, with the open documentation they released, was able to make a driver for BeOS. It worked but looking back it’s stark how much I have learned since then. One feature I particularly love is a dual head setup app using combo boxes instead of menus!
Th code is still online, in full early 2000s web styling.