The Monochrome Display Adapter (MDA, also MDA card) introduced in 1981 was IBM's standard video display card and computer display standard for the PC. The MDA did not have any graphics mode of any kind; it only featured a single monochrome text mode (PC video mode 7), which could display 80 columns by 25 lines of high resolution text characters.

The standard IBM MDA card was equipped with 4 kilobytes of video memory. The MDA's high character resolution (sharpness) was a feature meant to facilitate business and word processing use:
Each character was rendered in a box of 9x14 pixels, of which 7x11 made out the character itself (the other pixels being used for space between character columns and lines).
The MDA featured the following character display attributes: invisible, underline, normal, bright (bold), reverse video, and blinking; some of these attributes could be combined, so that e.g., bright, underlined text could be produced. The theoretical total screen resolution of the MDA was 720×350 pixels. This number is arrived at through calculating character width (9 pixels) by columns of text (80) and character height (14 pixels) by rows of text (25). However, the MDA again could not address individual pixels; it could only work in text mode, limiting its choice of display patterns to 256 characters. The only way to produce "graphical" screen content would have been through ANSI art.