Hercules Computer Technology

Hercules Computer Technology (HCT) was formed in 1982 in Hercules, California, by Van Suwannukul and Kevin Jenkins and was one of the major graphics card companies of the 1980s. Its biggest products were the MDA-compatible Hercules Graphics Card (HGC) and Hercules Graphics Card Plus (HGC+) and the associated standard, which was widely copied and survived into the 1990s. By the first half of 1986 HCT had 50% of the monochrome-graphics market; its 18% of the overall graphics card market was second to IBM, which benefited from selling its cards with its computers. The Hercules Graphics Card includes a Centronics-compatible parallel printer port, the same as the IBM Monochrome Display and Printer Adapter board that the card was based on. HCT also produced CGA compatible cards, and with the unsuccessful Hercules InColor Card, it tried to go head-to-head with the Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA). After low sales with InColor, HCT stopped making its own graphics core and bought graphics chipsets from other manufacturers. The company name gradually declined through the 1990s while graphics chipsets firms such as Tseng Labs, S3 Graphics, 3Dfx, nVidia and ATI Technologies became popular, but sales of graphic cards were still at US$20 million in 1998. An acquisition of HCT by German graphics card maker ELSA fell through in 1998 after the companies could not agree on terms. The Hercules brand was acquired by the French-Canadian based Guillemot Corporation for $1.8 million.