ISA

ISA Author: G. Shannon Frampton

(I.S.A or Eye-sa bus)

ISA stands for Industry Standard Architecture and is a type of bus used in PCs. It's purpose to allow memory expansion by connecting peripheral cards to the motherboard. ISA slots can be used to add video cards, memory cards and extra serial points. This technology was introduced in 1981 by IBM as part of their IMBPc project however it was not too widely used until 1984 when a 16 bit version was released for use. Both 8 bit and 16 bit cards can be used in an ISA slot;however, 8 bit cards are read by only the front of the slot while 16 bit cards are read by both the back and the front of the slots. Although it still remained popular in the 1990s and 1980s slowly the ISA bus began to be replaced by the faster PCI and AGP slots. Today modern PC's do not have ISA slots.

Editor: Sam Kim

==Pictures ==