Industry Standard Architecture
Sign in to saveAlso known as ISA, PC/AT-bus, ISA bus, PC bus, AT bus
16-bit internal bus of the IBM PC/AT
Key facts
- Year created
- 1981 ; 45 years ago ( 1981 )
- Created by
- IBM
- Superseded by
- PCI , LPC (1993, 1998)
- Width in bits
- 8 or 16
- Number span no of devices
- up to 6 devices
- Speed
- Half-duplex 8 MB/s or 16 MB/s
- Style
- Parallel
- Hotplugging interface
- No
- External interface
- No
via Wikipedia infobox
Wikidata facts
- Developer
- IBM
- Image
- Isa1.jpg
Show 3 more facts
- Commons category
- ISA
- inception
- 1981-00-00
- replaced by
- Accelerated Graphics Port
Sources (2)
via Wikidata · CC0
~20 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) is the 16-bit internal bus of IBM PC/AT and similar computers based on the Intel 80286 and its immediate successors during the 1980s. The bus was (largely) backward compatible with the 8-bit bus of the 8088-based IBM PC, including the IBM PC/XT as well as IBM PC compatibles.
Originally referred to as the PC bus (8-bit) or AT bus (16-bit), it was also termed I/O Channel by IBM. The ISA term was coined as a retronym by IBM PC clone manufacturers in the late 1980s or early 1990s as a reaction to IBM attempts to replace the AT bus with its new and incompatible Micro Channel architecture.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Industry Standard Architecture” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.