ISA

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ISA Slots
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ISA Slots
An ISA ethernet card
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An ISA ethernet card

Industry Standard Architecure

The ISA bus is a system bus for expansion cards. Initially it was 8 bits wide, but was eventually doubled to 16 bits. The ISA bus can be found in most PCs up to the Pentium 2, even though in the end, systems came with only 1 or 2 slots. The bus was used for basically any expansion card. ISA slots are easily recognizable, they are long black slots with clear visible contacts.

During the 486 era more bandwidth was required and the Vesa Local Bus was introduced. The VLB was an expansion to the ISA bus but relied heavily on the 486 design. Once the Pentium was introduced the well known PCI bus made its appearance.

Features:

  • 4.77 MHz 8-bit or 8 MHz 16-bit
  • 16 MB/s max bandwidth
  • Very limited Plug And Play support
  • Slows down the rest of a system when used in modern systems

See also

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