Why was NEC able to wrestle PC graphics standards away from IBM?

Question

The dominant standards for PC graphics in the 1980s were the ones introduced by IBM. This included MDA and CGA with the original IBM PC, followed by EGA shortly after the PC/AT, and then VGA with the PS/2 line. While there were other popular cards like Hercules, the PC clone industry mainly followed IBM's lead, and clone graphics cards were work-a-likes of the IBM cards.

This seemed to change abruptly after 1988 when VESA was formed, and started defining enhanced versions of VGA hardware. This was an initiative started by NEC.

Why did NEC start VESA to begin with, and why was NEC/VESA so successful at taking over this role of defining PC graphics standards?

Answer 1

VGA was introduced in 1987 with IBM's PS/2 line. NEC and VESA developed SuperVGA in 1988, but at the time it used the old and slow 8/16-bit ISA bus.

Improving video performance was a top priority at NEC to help sell its high-end displays as well as its own PC systems. By 1991, video performance had become a real bottleneck in most PC systems. (316)

To fix this bottleneck, NEC invented the high speed VESA Local Bus (VLB), a precursor to PCI, and turned it over to VESA.

The IBM PS/2 had the high speed Micro Channel Architecture (MCA) bus, but IBM demanded royalties on every machine sold and so only a few companies ever adopted it. Most of those that did only had it on part of their PC range.

Why would this be a concern for NEC? It would have limited the market for their high-end displays, which was a sizable and important business segment for the company. NEC's displays were generally regarded as some of the best in the industry at the time.

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Mueller, Scott. Upgrading and Repairing PCs, 14th Edition. Que, 2003.

Answer 2

I think that this was part of the larger trend of IBM losing the leadership of the “PC”, especially after the PS/2 and the MCA debacle (although the PS/2 line did introduce many new features which became de facto PC standards).

Looking at graphics specifically, after the VGA, IBM developed the 8514/A and then the XGA. For most consumers these had several disadvantages: they were expensive, they targeted high-end 1024×768 monitors (fixed-frequency in some cases), and they are accelerators. They were great for CAD and similar tools which could use specific drivers and benefited from the accelerated functions, but they didn’t have any significant advantage for most PC users. The lack of support for 800×600 might have mattered too: while higher-end 13-14” monitors of the era supported 1024×768, in practice that was too fine for most users.

I’m not sure that it’s accurate to say that NEC wrested PC graphics standards away from IBM. For a start IBM wasn’t holding on to them ;-). But NEC didn’t really end up writing the next chapter either... In the late 80s and early 90s, PC graphics was a mess of competing implementations, and any software which wanted to work on a variety of graphics adapters, using their capabilities beyond VGA, ended up having to support them all separately. See Fractint for one example of this. In the late 80s, there wasn’t much use for anything beyond VGA anyway, for most users:

• CPUs weren’t fast enough to run games at higher resolutions (even 640×480 in 256 colours wasn’t used much before higher-end 486s);
• Windows hadn’t taken the world by storm;
• even spreadsheet graphics and presentation programs didn’t really need anything beyond 640×480 (computers screens weren’t the primary output medium for communication anyway);
• multi-sync monitors were expensive.

After VGA, I’d say the next significant PC graphics standard was Windows 3 drivers; that’s what brought unification back. NEC’s SuperVGA “standard” did help by providing a fall-back, but that was only really significant with Windows 3 anyway (and its SuperVGA driver). Most graphics adapters provided their own, specific Windows 3 drivers... In terms of graphics standards, VBE only made an impact with version 1.2 in 1991, and even then, it ultimately ended up being a common API for games running on top of SciTech’s drivers.

That’s not to say that NEC’s endeavours weren’t significant; the VESA Local Bus was a huge improvement, but that’s not a graphics standard, and it was developed later (1992). It does however explain why VESA itself ended up being successful. As for why NEC started VESA to drive and publish these standards, it’s probably because it was too small a player to change the industry on its own, and consortia were popular at the time (see also EISA, in 1988).

Answer 3

I would suggest that choosing an industry group’s standard rather than that of a single company is obviously preferable to anyone not in that single company.

Answer 4

The other answers mention PS/2 and MCA but don't quite bring out the political dimension.

The history behind it is that when IBM came fairly late to the 16-bit PC market, populated with a wide variety of hardware architectures (all loosely based around the 8086, and unified by all being compatible with Digital Research CPM/86) they did so with an unusually open architecture - publishing the lot - (though asserting copyright on the BIOS, and selling MS/DOS).

This successfully wiped out all the other x86 architectures, that couldn't become compatible with IBM PC BIOS and the expansion slot architecture. Pretty soon everything that wasn't an IBM PC was an IBM clone.

After a few years, (well into the 286 era to about the start of the 386) when the clones started out-selling the PCs, the IBM response was to close their system with the PS/2 and its MCA architecture. This time, perhaps because it was relatively closed, the strategy of bringing out a new architecture didn't work...

VESA was the clone maker's response ... to bypass the PS/2 and MCA closed architecture altogether, and to deliver equivalent performance by other means ... and presumably it was NEC's internal development that was proposed - and adopted - for the VESA standard.

At about the same time, PCI development was under way, but it was clear that it would take a while, and VESA had a couple of years market opportunity before PCI would be fully ready.