IO Research Advert - September 1983

The Pluto graphics card from IO Research, first launched in 1982, could perhaps lay claim to being one of the first "high end" graphics cards aimed at consumers.

Re-sold by Nascom as its "Colour Graphics Card", and also by Gemini Microcomputers, the Pluto was also available with interfaces for "most machines" of the day, including Chuck Peddle's Sirius 1, the Apple II and anything running on an S-100 bus.

It wasn't cheap though. The standard Pluto retailed at £499, or £2,120 in 2024, whilst the Pluto Mega-Res, also mentioned in the advert and which could do an impressive 1024x768 (interlaced) resolution was a hefty £1,400^[1] - that's around £5,950 now.

Perhaps the ultimate though was a three-board configuration - probably one board for each primary colour - that could do an almost-unheard-of-at-the-time 16.7 million colours, which could be applied to any pixel.

That's pretty much the standard sRGB 24-bit computer pallete that's still prevalent in the 2020s, at least until 30-bit HDR and UHD become more widespread.

The price of that was way beyond the home user though - £3,800 is around £16,100 in 2024.

The company was actually founded in 1980 as a producer of general add-on boards for Nascom's Nasbus/80-Bus. Products included an analogue-digital I/O board, an EPROM programmer and a regular graphics board.

IO Research was still going until at least 1987, having launched its Pluto II range the year before^[2].