Monochrome Display Adapter
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The Monochrome Display Adapter (MDA, also MDA card) introduced in 1981 was IBM's standard video display card and computer display standard for the PC. The MDA did not have any graphics mode of any kind; it only featured a single monochrome text mode (PC video mode 7), which could display 80 columns by 25 lines of high resolution text characters.
The standard IBM MDA card was equipped with 4 kilobytes of video memory. The MDA's high character resolution (sharpness) was a feature meant to facilitate business and wordprocessing use:
Each character was rendered in a box of 9×14 pixels, of which 7×11 made out the character itself (the other pixels being used for space between character columns and lines).
The MDA featured the following character display attributes: invisible, underline, normal, bright (bold), reverse video, and blinking; some of these attributes could be combined, so that e.g., bright, underlined text could be produced.
The theoretical total screen resolution of the MDA was 720×350 pixels. This number is arrived at through calculating character width (9 pixels) by columns of text (80) and character height (14 pixels) by rows of text (25). However, the MDA again could not address individual pixels; it could only work in text mode, limiting its choice of display patterns to 256 characters (see Code page 437). The only way to produce "graphical" screen content would have been through ANSI art.
Competing adapters
There were two commonly available competing display adapters:
- For PC users requiring bitmapped graphics and/or color, IBM offered its Color Graphics Adapter (CGA, also CGA card), launched at the same time as their MDA. The CGA was originally more expensive and intended as a higher end solution, however the lower resolution of its text mode characters (as compared to MDA) made CGA cards less attractive for business use.
- Introduced in 1982, the non-IBM Hercules Graphics Card (also HGC) offered both an MDA compatible high resolution text mode and a monochrome graphics mode. It could address individual pixels and display a black and white picture of 720×348 pixels. This resolution was better than even the highest b/w resolution CGA cards could offer. Thus, even without a colour capability of any kind, the Hercules adapter's offer of monochrome graphics without sacrificing MDA-equivalent text quality made it a more desirable choice for many.