>Well, a 486 would have used it! VLB was the best bus for a few years
>during 486's, before the Pentiums. Most 486s had them, but some
>486DX4's had PCI and a few even had both VLB/PCI. Same with P60.
My first >8086 PC was a 486DX2/66 (circa 1993/4) - the motherboard had the
standard 8 ISA 16-bit slots, with the three sets of solder pads for VLB
connectors (I've never seen a PC with more than 3 VLB slots - or was it 4?
Hmm). The guys who built this m/b had got all the right chips to support VLB,
so as soon as the board was retired I tried to attach the VLB edge connectors -
pity I wasn't wearing my glasses really, it'll never run again :(... My
Pentium motherboard (circa 1997) has the same arrangement, 2 ISA, 3 PCI, 1
ISA/PCI slot - the three ISAs have the grid of solder pads at the base for some
reason, even though the m/b won't take anything slower than P100s, which I've
never seen used with VLB... Mass production I s'pose.
>IIRC, there was two camps fighting each other: VLB and PCI. VLB was
>cheaper and initially won many customers, but PCI is better
>technically and adopted as Pentium standard - mostly used still even
>in PII.
Well VLB also has the advantage that you can run an ISA card in the VLB slot...
Also, I think I've seen a few cards that'll run in either an ISA or VLB slot -
autodetecting which... Bit like old 8/16-bit cards worked. PCI, OTOH, is not
backward compatible at all - this means the design can be more efficient. It
also had the backing of Intel - the PCI bus is a direct connection to a P5 and
above IIRC, with a PCI-to-ISA bridge chip somewhere along the line. VLB was
the VESA Local Bus - designed by the Video Electronics Standards Association
for fast cards like video adapters (naturally).
PCI-X (the new one - I think that's the correct term) is not being designed by
Intel though, which might be interesting... although I think it would be a
rather bad idea for Intel to launch a competing standard just to regain
control - IBM did similar with MCA, and look how popular *that* is today.
Regards, Home page: http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Horizon/8786
Ben A L Jemmett ICQ: 9848866 JGSD e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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