Tuesday, January 26, 2010

ISA Expansion Slots

ISA Expansion Slots & Cards
The Industry Structured Architecture as known as ISA or AT Bus is used in most PC's to add expansion slot cards. ISA are more commonly used for adding video cards, networking cards, and external serial ports. When looking up information on ISA you will find that it comes in two versions which are: 8 Bits & 16 Bits slots. The 8 Bit expansion slot was introduced in early 80's.The 8 Bit bus is very slow and runs at a 4.77 MHz The 8 bit expansion cards are small and have one set of fingers on them. The fingers are those gold lines on the card. The 16 Bit expansion slot was also introduced a couple of years later and runs faster because it operates at 8 MHz speed. The 16 Bit ISA bus expansion slot has two sets of fingers on them. The 16 Bit ISA bus can be found in 286, 386, 486, and Pentium computers. The 8 Bit and 16 Bit expansion cards can use the same slot on the system board. The ISA expansion slots are normally black.

8 - Bit Expansion Card & Slot:









16 -Bit Expansion Card & Slot














Since I know what the ISA Expansion Slot is I now have to answer the question How is the ISA Expansion Slots used?

ISA Expansion slots are used in the real world to expand your capabilities. This basically expands what you computer can do. So let say from a computer tech point of view if I wanted to expaned the video component on my computer I would just go to the store and purchase a video expansion card that will be compatible with my expansion slot on my motherboard.

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