Number Nine Visual Technology
Number Nine Visual Technology, based in Lexington / Massachusetts was a manufacturer of graphics cards and graphics chips for PCs. Number Nine was the mid-1990s the dominant provider of high-performance graphics cards. Like many other manufacturers was Number Nine on the success of 3D accelerator surprised and could not develop a competitive graphics chip.
Number Nine is also known for the use of terms of the musical group The Beatles. Many products of Number Nine (as well as the company itself) had names that are related to the Beatles, such as revolution, Imagine, Ticket to Ride, Pepper, etc. It was also on all graphics card boards from a line from a Beatles song with printed.
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 brought the Number Nine Graphics system on the market, which was in competition with IBM's CGA and commanded a resolution up to 1024 × 768 pixels ( with 16 colors ).
In 1984 they brought the revolution 512x8 the first graphics card on the market that could display 256 colors. Shortly after the revolution 512x32, the first " true color " graphics card in the world ( 16.7 million colors).
Until the early 1990s to Number Nine concentrated on the high- end market, which you can see in these developments. Due to the proliferation of Microsoft Windows now also asked the masses to Windows accelerators. Number Nine satisfied the demand by developed maps for the mainstream area. Since developing its own chips would it have been too costly, they chose S3 Inc. as a partner for the delivery of appropriate graphics chips. One result of this development was the # 9GXE.
Number Nine developed but for the high-end market continues to own graphics chips and cards, such as 1994, the well known and famous Imagine 128, the first graphics card in the world with a 128 -bit graphics chip. This graphics card then gave by far the highest performance and distanced the competition like Matrox significantly.
Was the restructuring of a public company also in 1994.
As early as 1999, the manufacturer was struck. The last self-developed graphics chip was crowned by little success Ticket to Ride IV, who was on the Revolution IV video card. The 128 -bit processor could not keep up in performance as well as in the supported 3D capabilities with the competition.
The use of " Savage 4 " graphic chips the company S3 also managed a short period only remedy.
In early 2000 the Number Nine Visual Technology Inc. acquired by the S3 Inc..
On July 1, 2000, Number Nine is a business operations.
Founded in 2002, two former Number Nine engineers, James Macleod and Francis Bruno, Silicon Spectrum, Inc. and licensed Number Nines graphics technology from S3 for FPGA.
The Number Nine website was still five years after the closing of the company is active, partly held by a former employee and # 9 enthusiasts running and looked after. In March 2005, the site was closed and taken over the domain name from a bookmaker.
In 2013 there was an attempt on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter.com to make a derivative of "# 9 Ticket To Ride IV" designs for $ 200,000 of the open source community is available, my target but clearly with only about. $ 13,000.