[ The PC Guide | Systems and Components Reference Guide | Video Cards | Video Display Standards ]

Monochrome Display Adapter (MDA)

The first video cards used in the earliest machines conformed to the MDA standard, established by IBM as part of the original PC. MDA is a monochrome-only, text-only standard, allowing text display at 80x25 characters. Each character is made up of a matrix that is 9 dots wide by 14 dots high, yielding an effective resolution of 720x350 at a refresh rate of 50 Hz (of course it is text-only so these dots are not individually addressable).

Obviously, MDA is beyond obsolete. However, at the time it was a good solution for the limited capabilities of the original PC.

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