How Two Montréal Engineers Bootstrapped Matrox Into a Graphics Powerhouse

Matrox began in 1976 when McGill-trained engineer Lorne Trottier and his friend Branko Matić spotted an opening in connecting CPUs to video output. Working nights while Trottier kept a day job—and running orders through a second phone line answered by his mother—the pair (the name fuses Matić and Trottier) shipped their first product the same year. A free listing in the new-products section of Electronics magazine pulled in $20,000 in orders for their MTX-1632 video RAM board, making the company profitable almost immediately and funding a fast cadence of follow-on hardware.

Matrox carved out its early niche on price-to-performance. While the MTX-256² and later boards weren’t originally built for hobbyist microcomputers, nothing else offered DMA-driven ‘high resolution’ graphics for under $1,000, undercutting alternatives like DEC’s $14,000 GT-40. After Trottier scouted the S-100-dominated PC ‘76 festival, Matrox pivoted to S-100 bus cards such as the ALT-256² and ALT-512, which delivered roughly four times the resolution of rival adapters plus color, grayscale, and both US and European TV compatibility. By 1978 the company claimed more than 10,000 installations—including ground-control displays for NASA’s Viking mission—and by 1979 it was supplying multi-display Quad Video boards to Wall Street integrators.

The firm scaled fast, growing around 200% a year to 50 employees by 1979, with Trottier deliberately modeling a relaxed, profit-sharing, HP-inspired culture. Through the early-to-mid 1980s Matrox broadened beyond S-100 to Multibus and DEC PDP-11 platforms and moved up-market with products like the GXB-1000 controller and the cheaper SX-900, which paired an 80286 with an NEC uPD7220 to hit a then-impressive 20 MPixels/sec fill rate—an early chapter in what became a long-running professional graphics business.