I had, briefly, some Matrox card with 3D acceleration on a DOS PC. It drove a PGA (Professional Graphics Adapter) monitor, a standard that predated VGA and went nowhere.
The monitor was quite good but useless with anything else.
For a time in the 1980s, I was writing drivers for graphics boards, and later doing 3D animation software. I tried a lot of graphics boards from now-forgotten vendors. Texas Instruments had the first PC RGB monitor and display that could display white text without color smear.
The Wang Professional Image Computer was incompatible with everything else in PCs, with a different card form factor, a different monitor interface, and a different memory/device address layout that allowed 720KB of memory instead of 640KB. Plus their own version of DOS.
Fujitsu lent me a prototype Fujitsu Sapphire, which never worked right. When I went to return it to their location in Sunnyvale, they'd moved out, shutting down their 3D graphics business.
Dynamic Pictures had a decent 3D board, the Oxygen 202, that worked with NT 3.51. It took a while to get that working, but eventually it worked and I got 3D work done.
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.
Yeah, I wanted a Matrox so bad at that time because you could also do dual monitor on some of those cards. I had a sick NEC with a degauss button and trinitron style horizontal lines and a shit packard bell monitor. I wanted to do dual monitors so bad with both, despite the resolution asymmetry. Some matrox also had connection points for antennas and video capture. They were truly workhorse cards. But they sucked at 3D and were lapped in the Boot mag benchmarks for Quake 3D et al. I ended up with a 3D Labs Permidia 3D card anyway because I couldn't afford a Diamond or Voodoo and ended up turning textures off fully on Quake 3d in the end. Fun times, shout out Hard OCP.
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?
That was an interesting read. Unfortunately I never has the pleasure of owning a Matrox. I got really close to buying a Millennium G200 back in the late 90s, but decided to go for the RIVA TNT instead. Was in the nVidia camp (with brief stints in Intel and ATi) until I swithed to ATi/AMD for good around 15 years ago.
I had the original Matrox Millenium. Just threw out the old box a couple years ago when my parents sold their house. I remember driving like 50 miles to CDW will call to get it and being amazed at the 3D demo programs. I kept it for awhile but eventually got a 3DFX Voodoo card. And then a Voodoo Rush card that was a complete POS.
Somewhere around early 2000, I used to work part-time with a local video editing agency. Matrox video capture cards were the really high bar, other than Avid. At least that is what I remember. We had a couple of Matrox capture cards, expensive for our tiny budget. Other than that and a few 3D cards also around that time, I forgot about Matrox.
I had I think a G400 and G450 in my desktop at work at different points around 2001 and my recollection is they had a reputation for high output quality (DAC and such).
My first pc had some trident video card that failed right away and the local shop replaced with a millennium (g200, I think). I definitely got the better end of that one. It was 3d accelerated and came with some 3d text art tool that made animated text gifs in the software too.
I had the Matrox Marvel G200-TV I think in the late nineties. That graphics card was a beauty. It even let me watch TV on my computer as long as I threaded a coax cable up to my bedroom!
Matrox Mystique for my first build. Free MechWarrior and plenty of time burned there. Good times. It can be startling how thousands of dollars of premium gear can become e-waste in short order.
I had, briefly, some Matrox card with 3D acceleration on a DOS PC. It drove a PGA (Professional Graphics Adapter) monitor, a standard that predated VGA and went nowhere. The monitor was quite good but useless with anything else.
For a time in the 1980s, I was writing drivers for graphics boards, and later doing 3D animation software. I tried a lot of graphics boards from now-forgotten vendors. Texas Instruments had the first PC RGB monitor and display that could display white text without color smear. The Wang Professional Image Computer was incompatible with everything else in PCs, with a different card form factor, a different monitor interface, and a different memory/device address layout that allowed 720KB of memory instead of 640KB. Plus their own version of DOS. Fujitsu lent me a prototype Fujitsu Sapphire, which never worked right. When I went to return it to their location in Sunnyvale, they'd moved out, shutting down their 3D graphics business. Dynamic Pictures had a decent 3D board, the Oxygen 202, that worked with NT 3.51. It took a while to get that working, but eventually it worked and I got 3D work done.
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.
Yeah, I wanted a Matrox so bad at that time because you could also do dual monitor on some of those cards. I had a sick NEC with a degauss button and trinitron style horizontal lines and a shit packard bell monitor. I wanted to do dual monitors so bad with both, despite the resolution asymmetry. Some matrox also had connection points for antennas and video capture. They were truly workhorse cards. But they sucked at 3D and were lapped in the Boot mag benchmarks for Quake 3D et al. I ended up with a 3D Labs Permidia 3D card anyway because I couldn't afford a Diamond or Voodoo and ended up turning textures off fully on Quake 3d in the end. Fun times, shout out Hard OCP.
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?
That was an interesting read. Unfortunately I never has the pleasure of owning a Matrox. I got really close to buying a Millennium G200 back in the late 90s, but decided to go for the RIVA TNT instead. Was in the nVidia camp (with brief stints in Intel and ATi) until I swithed to ATi/AMD for good around 15 years ago.
Had the Millennium. Wanted the Riva TNT. I had also file-deleted both of those from my brain.
great read. I was with 3dfx however, yet for 2D matrox was the reference.
G400 was the first gfx card I cared about - dual head Debian bliss...
I had the original Matrox Millenium. Just threw out the old box a couple years ago when my parents sold their house. I remember driving like 50 miles to CDW will call to get it and being amazed at the 3D demo programs. I kept it for awhile but eventually got a 3DFX Voodoo card. And then a Voodoo Rush card that was a complete POS.
Somewhere around early 2000, I used to work part-time with a local video editing agency. Matrox video capture cards were the really high bar, other than Avid. At least that is what I remember. We had a couple of Matrox capture cards, expensive for our tiny budget. Other than that and a few 3D cards also around that time, I forgot about Matrox.
As an aside, I always found the clown on the Matrox boxes creepy - never made me want to buy the graphics card.
It gave the card an aura of mystique (pun intended) and I remember really wanting it. I guess that means they succeeded in making a statement with it.
I had I think a G400 and G450 in my desktop at work at different points around 2001 and my recollection is they had a reputation for high output quality (DAC and such).
Je me souviens de passer régulièrement près du siège social dans le west island lorsque je travaillais à Montréal.
Matrox était connu pour faire d’excellentes cartes pour le médical. Malheureusement, 3dfx était trop en avance pour les jeux.
My first pc had some trident video card that failed right away and the local shop replaced with a millennium (g200, I think). I definitely got the better end of that one. It was 3d accelerated and came with some 3d text art tool that made animated text gifs in the software too.
I had the Matrox Marvel G200-TV I think in the late nineties. That graphics card was a beauty. It even let me watch TV on my computer as long as I threaded a coax cable up to my bedroom!
Matrox Mystique for my first build. Free MechWarrior and plenty of time burned there. Good times. It can be startling how thousands of dollars of premium gear can become e-waste in short order.