ATI (Array Technologies Incorporated) was founded in 1985 in Markham, Ontario, Canada by three men from Hong Kong. It started out manufacturing integrated graphics chips for companies like IBM. By 1987 it was producing it’s own graphics cards, the EGA and VGA Wonder brands, and on it’s way to the top of the graphics industry.
Subsequently, ATI introduced the Mach series of cards starting with the Mach8 in 1991, and ending with the Mach64 in 1994. The Mach64 put the company on the map for it’s revolutionary design, which used the Mach series’ abilities to take on more of the graphics load from the CPU and allowed for video playback. It was one of the first chips with this “motion video” acceleration technology.
Later, integrated TV tuner products and a mass of other graphics accelerators and chips were ATI powered. This included console game systems and digital television products. ATI became a multibillion dollar company providing many of today’s modern graphics cards and hardware.
The company was bought by AMD in 2006 in a 5.6 billion deal, which continued the production of graphics cards and products under the ATI brand until the name was retired in 2010.