Brand: Number Nine
Founded by: Andrew Najda & Stan Bialek
Headquarters: USA
Since: 1982
Until: 1999

Number Nine Visual Technology Corporation was a renowned manufacturer of video chips and graphics cards from 1982 to 1999.

This company developed the first 128-bit graphics processor (the Imagine 128), as well as the first 256-color (8-bit) and 16.8 million-color (24-bit) graphics cards.

Number Nine was founded in 1982 by Andrew Najda and Stan Bialek as Number Nine Computer Corporation. The company was renamed Number Nine Visual Technology Corporation in the early 1990s. For most of its existence, Number Nine was headquartered in Lexington, Massachusetts. Initially, Number Nine manufactured an accelerator card for the Apple II, and later, in 1983, it began designing and manufacturing high-end graphics cards for PCs. Number Nine was one of the leading high-end graphics card companies in the early 1990s.
During the mid-to-late 1990s, Number Nine began losing market share to its competitors, both in terms of price and performance. Number Nine was slow to respond to the rise of 3D graphics and continued to emphasize fast, high-quality 2D graphics.

On December 20, 1999, Number Nine announced a "letter of intent" for S3 Inc. (later S3 Graphics Co.) to purchase substantially all of Number Nine's assets and intellectual property. By mid-2000, S3 had completed the acquisition of Number Nine's assets, and Number Nine had ceased operations. In 2002, two former Number Nine engineers, James Macleod and Francis Bruno, formed Silicon Spectrum, Inc. and licensed Number Nine's graphics technology from S3 for implementation in FPGA devices.

For five years after Number Nine closed its doors, a former employee kept the Number Nine website running, with driver downloads and a forum available for self-help. For the last two and a half years, a volunteer and #9 enthusiast provided regular, ad hoc technical support on the forum. Several former employees occasionally helped out. The site eventually went offline in March 2005, and the domain name was taken over by an online gambling company.

Number Nine's first graphics cards were ISA bus cards, predating the VGA standard, which did not have graphics accelerator chips. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Number Nine manufactured ISA bus and MCA graphics cards based on Texas Instruments' TIGA coprocessors.

Beginning in the 1990s, Number Nine manufactured AGP and PCI graphics cards with its own graphics accelerators (the Imagine line of GPUs).
At the same time, Number Nine manufactured AGP, PCI, VLB, and ISA graphics cards with accelerator chips from S3 Graphics.
Its last AGP card used an Nvidia GPU.

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