[Courses] [Networking] PCI (was: Lesson Two - Purchasing the Right Hardware)

[Morgon Kanter]

> In the beginning, hardware manufacturers said "let there be a motherboard"
> and lo and behold there was a motherboard. These early motherboards
> contained only slots for mounting the CPU, RAM and keyboard. Everything
> else; diskdrive controllers, video card, serial and parallel ports had to be
> purchased separately and plugged into the motherboard. If you wanted to use
> your computer for a specialist purpose, such as controlling manufacturing
> equipment or taking sensor readings, you needed to purchase these cards
> separately as well. Obviously you needed some sort of standard that allowed
> you to purchase all these different cards from different manufacturers yet
> have them all fit onto your motherboard (and work).
> 
> So they devised a standard that allowed just that. The early standard was
> called ISA and stands for Industry Standard Architecture.

This is 100% completely off topic, (and probably nobody cares :) but 
there were earlier standards than ISA, such as the UNIBUS and (later) 
the Qbus for the DEC PDP-11.

-- 
Morgon Kanter <morgon at surgo.net> http://www.surgo.net
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