Hacker News Reader

Ah! Thank you! I knew PCI was a later standard, but I'll be damned if I could remember the one that preceded it...

I seem to remember Windows 95 and the quest for "plug 'n play" being what pushed the PCI standard into wide spread use. Basically the first standard that didn't require all the tedious mucking about with IRQ's, DMA and I/O Ports.

IIRC it was considered fashionable back in the day to install a card, wait for it not to work and then make a joke about "plug 'n pray" before finding an older, ISA card and getting it to work by setting the jumpers correctly.

In the mass market, that would be VESA Local Bus ;)

I recall vesa was only used for graphics cards. There was ISA and extended ISA for the rest (like modems and sound cards).

VESA Local Bus supplemented ISA. It did mostly see use as a graphics card expansion slot, but you could get various I/O cards. I saw a couple of boards in my lifetime that had those slots, thankfully didn't need to support them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com