Sure was. 720x348 if my memory isn't failing me (don't ask why I can remember such useless numbers for decades). And twice as many text columns. For a teenager into coding, it was heavenly.

I hooked a Hercules card and monitor up to my 486 with Linux and tinkered around. It was kind of cool to be able to draw graphics on a second amber (or was it green) monitor, but I never could get 2 terminals to work. Just writing directly in Hercules memory from root.

If I recall correctly, one could also debug a DOS programs and print stuff on the Hercules while doing graphical or text UI on the regular VGA.

Yeah for pure pixels it was up near VGA for games like Simcity and wasn’t really surpassed until we got to SVGA.

I used one(ISA) as text console next to a PCI-card, next to an AGP-Card around 1996, or so. True triple head setup! With BIOS boot set to Hercules as primary. Then when XFree86 got up, the other screens lit up, too. Worked under BSD & Linux :-)

Yeah, the different memory area worked even back in the CGA-EGA-VGA days - you could run some software that took advantage of it even in DOS - debuggers that showed debugging info on the Hercules and the "main screen" on the color.