here's something you've never seen before! this is the first prototype -- serial #1 -- of the famous Hercules graphics card. while i can't date this prototype, the chips have 1982 date codes. 
Hercules released their eponymous graphics board as a compatible upgrade to IBM's MDA card which is text-only. MDA only supports 80x25 text. Since each character cell is 9 pixels x 14 pixels tall, full screen resolution is 720x350.
Hercules provided a full framebuffer of 720x348 pixels. (graphics mode fell short by 2 lines for various technical reasons) since the sync signals were nearly identical, you could upgrade MDA to Hercules and keep your existing monitor!
the only other graphics card that was readily available at the time was the IBM CGA. sure, it was color, but the resolution was 640x200 with nasty rectangular pixels and issues with flicker and "CGA snow"
this is what the release version looked like. it's very close to the prototype, but presumably they incorporated all those bodge wires.
In comparison, here's what the card looked like a couple of revs in (the GB101). Looks like they moved a few chips around. (image from retrocmp.de/hardware/hercu…)
eventually they integrated about a dozen or so of those TTL chips into a custom chip, the "VIDEO 100". (image by Konstantin Lanzet.)
let's look at some interesting features of this early card. first, it has the super wide bracket, painted black, characteristic of rev A IBM 5150 cards.
based on the weird, often inconsistent angles of the traces, it's safe to assume this board was taped out by hand, not using CAD software.
check out this spare IC footprint that's been used for the two resistors!
header J1 (just the pads) would have been for a light pen. early PC graphics cards had this header but nobody really used the light pens. those are quite rare now.
on the back of the card, there's a part number (100-0001) and a revision mark: "rev -" 😂
i'd like to thank @kenshirriff for the photos of this very cool prototype hardware, and for graciously allowing me to use them for this writeup.
