The motherboard has been an integral part of most
personal
computers for more than 20 years. Think of a motherboard as a scale model
of a futuristic city with many modular plug-in buildings, each using power
from a common electrical system. Multiple-lane highways of various widths
transport data between the buildings. The motherboard is the data and power
infrastructure for the entire computer.
Motherboards (also called main boards) are actually a carryover from
architecture used for years in mainframe
computers. Various circuit cards performing various functions all plug
into many similar sockets on a common circuit board. Each circuit card
performs a unique function in the computer and gets its power from the socket.
Due to improvements in circuitry and packaging, motherboards have
essentially stayed the same size or shrunk while their functionality has
skyrocketed.
Background
The original IBM PC contained the original PC motherboard.
In this design, which
premiered in 1982, the motherboard itself was a large printed circuit card that
contained the 8088 microprocessor,
the BIOS, sockets for
the CPU's RAM and a
collection of slots that auxiliary cards could plug into.
If you wanted
to add a floppy
disk drive or a parallel
port or a joystick,
you bought a separate card and plugged it into one of the slots. This approach
was pioneered in the mass market by the Apple II machine.
By making it easy to
add cards, Apple and IBM accomplished two huge things:
They made it easy to add new features to the machine over time.
They opened the computer to creative opportunities for third-party
vendors.
Different motherboards of different vintages typically have different
form
factors. The form factor is essentially the size, shape and design of
the actual motherboard. There are more than a half-dozen form factors for
motherboards.
The motherboard, by enabling pluggable components, allows users to
personalize a computer system depending on their applications and needs.
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