was there a type of slot before ISA?

[tokamak]

first motherboard i ever bought had ISA and PCI.

 

[bozo1]

8-bit ISA was the first in the PC world.

 

[Electric Amish]

Does 8-bit ISA = VLB??

amish

 

[Rand]

I still remember playing around with so many systems that were almost entirely MCA- MicroChannel Architecture.
Had quite a bit of potential, it was certainly much better then the previous EISA standard.... of course EISA was dramatically cheaper to implement at the time.
Too bad IBM screwed up the MCA initiative.

 

[majewski9]

8 bit ISA

MCA was pretty cool, but IBM tried to monoplize it. Very few devices were made for the bus that weren't made by IBM.

 

[ScottMac]

EISA was created to compete with the IBM MCA. It came out after MCA. VL and "LocalBus" both came out before PCI as faster video-only connectors (like AGP is now).

Before ISA was the S100 bus. The processor card was frequently an 8080or Z80, occasionally an MC6800, OSI (Ohio Scientific, I think) was big with the 6805.

The chassis were fed with ~50Amp linear supplys (no switching power, this was pure rectifier and capacitor, fed with a 30 pound monster transformer ... pure muscle...).

And don't forget the Apple, the ][ and the ][+ were both on the market well before IBM came out with the PC.

Sinclair, Atari, and Commodore all had pre-pc computers, all had some flavor of propritary busses.

EuroBus-based computers were available, but usually for industrial controller applications (Ladder Process controllers, etc).

Intel had the MCS8080 developement system, but I'm pretty sure it was also S100.

I can't think of any (computer) systems that were based on the I4004, I'm sure there were some, but probably military-only, since most civilians wouldn't know what to do with all that raw power.......

FWIW

Scott

 

[DaveSimmons]

Originally posted by: Electric Amish
Does 8-bit ISA = VLB??
amish

No, more or less in order:
ISA 8-bit (PC & XT, 8088)
ISA 16-bit (286)

MCA (IBM-only microchannel)
EISA (Enhanced or Extended ISA, I forget)

VLB (VESA Local Bus, 486-era)

PCI (p1-era)

AGP (p2-era)

this is for PCs only, as ScottMac notes slots go back into the mists of time.

 

[Eug]

When my AGP video card (on my Celerymine system) died last year I managed to use for a few days an old ISA video card that was originally sitting in the bottom of computer junk pile. Man that was torture. Interesting being able to run an ISA card on a modern system with Windows 2000 though. Talk about legacy part...

Originally posted by: DaveSimmons

Originally posted by: Electric Amish
Does 8-bit ISA = VLB??
amish

No, more or less in order:
ISA 8-bit (PC & XT, 8088)
ISA 16-bit (286)

MCA (IBM-only microchannel)
EISA (Enhanced or Extended ISA, I forget)

VLB (VESA Local Bus, 486-era)

PCI (p1-era)

AGP (p2-era)

this is for PCs only, as ScottMac notes slots go back into the mists of time.

 

[redhatlinux]

Vesa Local Bus was not at all like AGP (which as its name implies is only a 'port' and NOT a bus). I've used VLB IDE controllers as well as Video Cards. Seem to remember that Video Cards were the first to use VLB.