If you've been around long enough to remember a time before modern-day GPUs were a thing, the name "Hercules Graphics Card" (HGCC might ring a bell. It quietly revolutionized PC graphics back in the early 80s for businesses, ushering in a new era of innovation in display hardware; you could say, Hercules walked so Nvidia and ATI could run. Even though it looks primitive by today's standards, it's always interesting to look back at how impactful old technology was when even the concept of a GPU was abstract. Let's go on a bit of a retrospective journey, courtesy of The 8-Bit Guy on YouTube, who explains not only the legend of Hercules in his video but also the inner workings of the actual hardware.
Before modern GPUs were capable of true graphical rendering, IBM PCs dominated the corporate world with unmatched credibility. Businesses essentially only needed to sift through spreadsheets and charts, handle basic accounting, and process large amounts of text in documents. For this, "graphics" weren't required; only numbers and letters were needed, which were far simpler to display. Think of it like a printer; seldom is one used for actual pictures with precise details, and more so for just text.
