Lorne Trottier was born on June 15, 1948 in Montréal. Trottier describes himself as a space and science geek, and he’s had a lifelong interest and passion in both space and electronics. In particular, Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight on May 5, 1961 and Apollo 11 in July of 1969 made a lasting impact on him.

He attended Baron Byng High School and Mc Gill University. He attained his master’s in engineering in 1973. Realizing that there was a market to be had in interfacing CPUs and video output, Lorne had an idea for a company.

He and his friend, Branko Matić, started working on some ideas in their spare time. Trottier had a second telephone line installed at his family home, his mother served as the receptionist, and he kept a day job. It was in 1976 that Trottier and Matić founded Matrox (Ma from Matić and Tro from Trottier) in Dorval, Quebec, and they launched their first product the same year.

As with many other technology companies at this time, success was built and failure found via the press, and more specifically, via magazines catering to specific interests. For Matrox, the publication was Electronics. They secured free placement in the new products section, and they managed to get $20,000 worth of orders for their Video RAM (MTX-1632).

This made the company immediately profitable, and they were able to make more products in rapid succession. Trottier and Matić undoubtedly read about the launch of the Altair 8800, but despite appearances, their first products weren’t intended for the S-100 bus machines despite being used with them. This was the MTX-1632 which provided 512 bytes of 650ns video memory while generating 32x16 ASCII display output.

It was priced at $198 (~ $1166 in 2026 dollars). Just shortly after the release of the 1632 came the MTX-256**2. This provided 256 by 256 dot raster resolution and was built of at least two separate units: central timing unit (CT U), image memory (IM).

As noted, this wasn’t initially intended for the home microcomputer market, and it wasn’t plug compatible with any home system. Yet, around August of 1976, this was the best display adapter setup per dollar and interfacing with a bidirectional microcomputer bus wasn’t particularly difficult. At this time, for around $100, one could have purchased a 96 by 64, byte parallel, display adapter kit that required programmed I/O for each point.

Moving up the scale, you had the Matrox MTX-256**2 at $630 (~ $3710 in 2026 dollars) interfaced with DMA providing multiple video modes and 256 by 256. For around $14,000, one could purchase the DEC GT-40 which offered hardware vector graphics and character generation, DMA, a built in display, a resolution of 1024 by 768, and a whole PDP-11/05 to drive the thing. For the financially successful or radically enthusiastic hobbyist, the Matrox was an obvious choice.

Nothing else in the market offered a “high resolution” display with DMA for under $1000. Personal Computing Consumer Trade Fair With two products (technically three, as there had been a less refined version of the MTX-1632 with no product designation, it was just “Video RAM”) on the market, Trottier made his way to the Personal Computing Consumer Trade Fair (better known as the Personal Computer Festival or PC ‘76) held at the Shelburne Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey on the 28th and 29th of August in 1976. This was an extremely important event for the industry with around five thousand people attending.

Companies like Apple, Byte, Cromemco, SWTPC, DEC, Processor Technology (Sol computer series) among others were present, and rather importantly, it was Apple’s first major public debut with Jobs and Dan Kottke manning the booth (Woz mostly hung out at the Hotel working on Apple Soft BASIC) and showing off the Apple I in a fully enclosed wooden case with integrated keyboard. At this time, however, the hot product was the Altair 8800, and next hottest ...