Number Nine
| Number Nine
|
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|---|---|
 |
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| legal form | Corporation |
| founding | 1982 |
| Seat | Lexington , United States |
| Branch | Hardware, computers |
| Website | www.nine.com ( Memento from January 17, 1999 in the Internet Archive ) |
Number Nine Visual Technology , based in Lexington / Massachusetts, was a manufacturer of graphics cards and graphics chips for PCs. Number Nine was the dominant supplier of high-performance graphics cards in the mid-1990s. Like many other manufacturers, Number Nine was surprised by the success of the 3D accelerator and was unable to develop a competitive graphics chip.
Number Nine also became known for the use of terms used by the Beatles music group . Many Number Nine products (as well as the company itself) had Beatles-related names such as: B. Revolution, Imagine, Ticket to Ride, Pepper, etc. Furthermore, a line from a Beatles song was printed on all graphics card boards of the manufacturer.
history
Number Nine was founded in 1982 by Andy Najda and Stan Bialek . The first product was an accelerator card for the Apple II , the so-called Number Nine Apple Booster.
Already in 1983 the focus was on graphics cards and chips and the Number Nine Graphics System was launched, which competed with IBM's CGA and had a resolution of up to 1024 × 768 pixels (with 16 colors).
In 1984, the 512x8 Revolution was the first graphics card that could display 256 colors. Shortly afterwards the 512x32 revolution, the world's first " true color " graphics card (16.7 million colors).
Until the beginning of the 1990s Number Nine focused on the high-end market, which can also be seen in the developments. Due to the widespread use of Microsoft Windows , the general public asked for Windows accelerators. Number Nine met demand by developing cards for the mainstream. Since developing their own chips would have been too time-consuming for this, S3 Inc. was chosen as a partner for the supply of corresponding graphics chips. One result of this development was the # 9GXE.
Number Nine continued to develop its own graphics chips and cards for the high-end market, e.g. B. 1994 the well-known and famous Imagine 128 , the first graphics card in the world with a 128-bit graphics chip. At that time, this graphics card offered by far the highest performance and clearly distanced itself from the competition like Matrox .
Also in 1994 the restructuring to a stock corporation took place .
As early as 1999, the manufacturer showed itself to be ailing. The last graphics chip developed in-house was Ticket to Ride IV , which was not very successful and was located on the Revolution IV graphics card. The 128-bit processor could not keep up with the competition in terms of performance or the supported 3D capabilities.
The use of "Savage 4" graphics chips from S3 also only helped for a short time.
At the beginning of 2000, Number Nine Visual Technology Inc. was taken over by S3 Inc.
On July 1, 2000, Number Nine ceased business operations.
In 2002, two former Number Nine engineers , James Macleod and Francis Bruno founded Silicon Spectrum, Inc. and licensed S3's Number Nines graphics technology for FPGA .
The Number Nine website was still active 5 years after the company closed, partly kept up and running by a former employee and # 9 enthusiast. In March 2005 the website was finally closed and the domain name was taken over by a betting provider.
In 2013 there was an attempt to make a derivative of a "# 9 Ticket To Ride IV" design available to the open source community for $ 200,000 via the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter.com , but clearly missed the target with only approx $ 13,000.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Golem: Graphics card manufacturer Number Nine in trouble?
- ^ Number Nine Visual Technology Company History . Number Nine Visual Technology. 1999. Archived from the original on January 17, 1999. Retrieved October 15, 2013.
- ^ Number Nine - Computer Dictionary Definition . Retrieved January 8, 2011.
- ^ Number Nine Visual Technology, Inc. Announces Merger Agreement . Reuters. December 20, 1999. Retrieved January 8, 2011.
- ^ Silicon Spectrum, Inc. - Overview . Retrieved January 8, 2011.
- ↑ An open source GPU at Kickstarter ( memento of the original from November 18, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on tomshardware.de (October 15, 2013)
- ↑ Open Source Graphics Processor (GPU) on kickstarter.com (Francis Bruno, English)
