Misplaced Pages

#468531

67-547: The original IBM MDA was an 8-bit ISA card with a Motorola 6845 display controller, 4 KB of RAM , a DE-9 output port intended for use with an IBM monochrome monitor , and a parallel port for attachment of a printer, avoiding the need to purchase a separate card. The MDA was based on the IBM System/23 Datamaster 's display system, and was intended to support business and word processing use with its sharp, high-resolution characters. Each character

134-724: A 16-bit transfer size, signal timing in the PIO modes and the interrupt and DMA mechanisms. The PC/XT-bus is an eight- bit ISA bus used by Intel 8086 and Intel 8088 systems in the IBM PC and IBM PC XT in the 1980s. Among its 62 pins were demultiplexed and electrically buffered versions of the 8 data and 20 address lines of the 8088 processor, along with power lines, clocks, read/write strobes, interrupt lines, etc. Power lines included −5 V and ±12 V in order to directly support pMOS and enhancement mode nMOS circuits such as dynamic RAMs among other things. The XT bus architecture uses

201-823: A CGA or other color card at address B8000h. In text mode, the HGC appears exactly like an MDA card. Graphics mode requires new techniques to use. Unlike the MDA and CGA, the PC BIOS provides no intrinsic support for the HGC. Hercules developed extensions, called HBASIC , for IBM Advanced BASIC to add HGC support and Hercules cards came with Graph X , a software library for Hercules graphical-mode support and geometric primitives . Popular IBM PC programs such as Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, AutoCAD computer-aided drafting, Pagemaker and Xerox Ventura desktop publishing, and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2.0 came with their own drivers to use

268-551: A color monitor, color appears as simulated grayscale in varying dithering patterns . Clones of the Hercules appeared, including generic models at very low prices, usually without the printer port. Hercules advertisements implied that use of generic Hercules clones can damage the monitor. The Hercules Graphics Card was very successful, especially after Lotus 1-2-3 supported it, with one-half million units sold by 1985. As of June 1986 Hercules Computer Technology had 18% of

335-524: A few unique signal lines specific to ATA/IDE hard disks (such as the Cable Select/Spindle Sync. line.) In addition to the physical interface channel, ATA goes beyond and far outside the scope of ISA by also specifying a set of physical device registers to be implemented on every ATA (IDE) drive and a full set of protocols and device commands for controlling fixed disk drives using these registers. The ATA device registers are accessed using

402-527: A printer port made it more appealing for the business applications that were the focus of the original PC. However, dissatisfaction with its limitations quickly led to third parties releasing competing hardware. A well known example was the Hercules Graphics Card . Introduced in 1982, it offered both an MDA-compatible high resolution text mode and a monochrome graphics mode. The founder of Hercules Computer Technology , Van Suwannukul, created

469-453: A second 8259 PIC (connected to one of the lines of the first) and 4 × 16-bit DMA channels, as well as control lines to select 8- or 16-bit transfers. The 16-bit AT bus slot originally used two standard edge connector sockets in early IBM PC/AT machines. However, with the popularity of the AT architecture and the 16-bit ISA bus, manufacturers introduced specialized 98-pin connectors that integrated

536-579: A separate clock generator, or a clock divider which either fixed the ISA bus frequency at 4, 6, or 8 MHz or allowed the user to adjust the frequency via the BIOS setup. When used at a higher bus frequency, some ISA cards (certain Hercules-compatible video cards, for instance), could show significant performance improvements. Memory address decoding for the selection of 8 or 16-bit transfer mode

603-514: A sharper text mode (equivalent to 720 × 350 ) but has no per-pixel addressing modes and is limited to a fixed character set . These adapters were quickly found to be inadequate by the market, creating a demand for a card that offers high-resolution graphics and text. The founder of Hercules Computer Technology , Van Suwannukul, created the Hercules Graphics Card so that he could work on his doctoral thesis on an IBM PC using

670-602: A single Intel 8259 PIC , giving eight vectorized and prioritized interrupt lines. It has four DMA channels originally provided by the Intel 8237 . Three of the DMA channels are brought out to the XT bus expansion slots; of these, 2 are normally already allocated to machine functions (diskette drive and hard disk controller): The PC/AT-bus , a 16- bit (or 80286-) version of the PC/XT bus,

737-603: A time, but this allowed for greater flexibility. The AT Attachment (ATA) hard disk interface is directly descended from the 16-bit ISA of the PC/AT. ATA has its origins in the IBM Personal Computer Fixed Disk and Diskette Adapter, the standard dual-function floppy disk controller and hard disk controller card for the IBM PC AT; the fixed disk controller on this card implemented the register set and

SECTION 10

#1732779641469

804-464: Is 5 V TTL , as with the MDA card. Nominally, the Hercules card provides a horizontal scanning frequency of 18.425 ± 0.500 kHz and 50 Hz vertical. It runs at two slightly different sets of frequencies depending on whether in text or graphics mode, providing a different vertical refresh rate and a different aspect ratio via a different pixel clock and number of scanlines. The Hercules card provides two modes: The text mode of

871-437: Is a computer graphics controller formerly made by Hercules Computer Technology, Inc. that combines IBM 's text-only MDA display standard with a bitmapped graphics mode, also offering a parallel printer port . This allows the HGC to offer both high-quality text and graphics from a single card. The HGC was very popular and became a widely supported de facto display standard on IBM PC compatibles . The HGC standard

938-454: Is a derivative of the ISA bus, utilizing the same signal lines with different connectors. The LPC bus has replaced the ISA bus as the connection to the legacy I/O devices on current motherboards; while physically quite different, LPC looks just like ISA to software, so the peculiarities of ISA such as the 16 MiB DMA limit (which corresponds to the full address space of the Intel 80286 CPU used in

1005-530: Is equipped with two ISA slots. It was marketed to industrial and military users who had invested in expensive specialized ISA bus adaptors, which were not available in PCI bus versions. Similarly, ADEK Industrial Computers released a modern motherboard in early 2013 for Intel Core i3/i5/i7 processors, which contains one (non-DMA) ISA slot. Also, MSI released a modern motherboard with one ISA slot in 2020. The PC/104 bus, used in industrial and embedded applications,

1072-414: Is now fairly hard to find. Some XT-IDE adapters were available as 8-bit ISA cards, and XTA sockets were also present on the motherboards of Amstrad 's later XT clones as well as a short-lived line of Philips units. The XTA pinout was very similar to ATA, but only eight data lines and two address lines were used, and the physical device registers had completely different meanings. A few hard drives (such as

1139-408: Is rendered in a box of 9 × 14 pixels , of which 7 × 11 depicts the character itself and the other pixels provide space between character columns and lines. Some characters, such as the lowercase "m", are rendered eight pixels across. The theoretical total screen display resolution of the MDA is 720 × 350 pixels, if the dimensions of all character cells are added up, but

1206-496: The Extended Industry Standard Architecture (EISA) and the later VESA Local Bus (VLB). VLB used some electronic parts originally intended for MCA because component manufacturers already were equipped to manufacture them. Both EISA and VLB were backward-compatible expansions of the AT (ISA) bus. Users of ISA-based machines had to know special information about the hardware they were adding to

1273-764: The Hercules Network Card Plus , ( HNC NB112 ) a variant of the Graphics Card Plus with an integrated TOPS /FlashTalk-compatible network adapter. Like the HGC+, it supported RAMFONT, but lacked a printer port. The InColor Card ( GB222 ) was introduced in April 1987. It included color capabilities similar to the EGA , with 16 colors from a palette of 64. It retained the same two modes ( 80 × 25 text with redefinable fonts and 720 × 348 graphics), and

1340-515: 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 . The 16-bit ISA bus was also used with 32-bit processors for several years. An attempt to extend it to 32 bits, called Extended Industry Standard Architecture (EISA),

1407-467: The Seagate ST351A/X) could support either type of interface, selected with a jumper. Many later AT (and AT successor) motherboards had no integrated hard drive interface but relied on a separate hard drive interface plugged into an ISA/EISA/VLB slot. There were even a few 80486-based units shipped with MFM/RLL interfaces and drives instead of the increasingly common AT-IDE. Commodore built

SECTION 20

#1732779641469

1474-527: The Thai alphabet , impossible with the low resolution of CGA or the fixed character set of MDA. It initially retailed in 1982 for $ 499. The original HGC is an 8-bit ISA card with 64 KB of RAM , visible on the board as eight 4164 RAM chips, and a DE-9 output compatible with the IBM monochrome monitor used with the MDA. Like the MDA, it includes a parallel interface for attaching a printer. The video output

1541-523: The 8-bit version as a buffered interface to the motherboard buses of the Intel 8088 (16/8 bit) CPU in the IBM PC and PC/XT, augmented with prioritized interrupts and DMA channels. The 16-bit version was an upgrade for the motherboard buses of the Intel 80286 CPU (and expanded interrupt and DMA facilities) used in the IBM AT, with improved support for bus mastering. The ISA bus was therefore synchronous with

1608-624: The AT bus's performance but in 1987, IBM replaced the AT bus with its proprietary Micro Channel Architecture (MCA). MCA overcame many of the limitations then apparent in ISA but was also an effort by IBM to regain control of the PC architecture and the PC market. MCA was far more advanced than ISA and had many features that would later appear in PCI. However, MCA was also a closed standard whereas IBM had released full specifications and circuit schematics for ISA. Computer manufacturers responded to MCA by developing

1675-451: The ATA standard (up to 133 MB/s for ATA-6, the latest.) In most forms, ATA ran much faster than ISA, provided it was connected directly to a local bus (e.g. southbridge-integrated IDE interfaces) faster than the ISA bus. Before the 16-bit ATA/IDE interface, there was an 8-bit XT-IDE (also known as XTA) interface for hard disks. It was not nearly as popular as ATA has become, and XT-IDE hardware

1742-516: The CPU clock of the 80286 in IBM PC/AT computers, which was 6 MHz in the first models and 8 MHz in later models. The IBM RT PC also used the 16-bit bus. ISA was also used in some non-IBM compatible machines such as Motorola 68k -based Apollo (68020) and Amiga 3000 (68030) workstations, the short-lived AT&T Hobbit and the later PowerPC -based BeBox . Companies like Dell improved

1809-402: The CPU clock until sophisticated buffering methods were implemented by chipsets to interface ISA to much faster CPUs. ISA was designed to connect peripheral cards to the motherboard and allows for bus mastering . Only the first 16 MB of main memory is addressable. The original 8-bit bus ran from the 4.77 MHz clock of the 8088 CPU in the IBM PC and PC/XT. The original 16-bit bus ran from

1876-479: The HGC can hold two graphics display pages. Either page can be selected for display by setting a single bit in the Mode Control Register. Another bit, in a configuration register exclusive to the HGC, determines whether the second 32 KB of RAM on the HGC is accessible to the CPU at the base address B8000h. This bit is reset at system reset (e.g. power-on) so that the card does not conflict with

1943-480: The Hercules Graphics Card so that he could work on his doctoral thesis on an IBM PC using the Thai alphabet , which was impossible at the low resolution of CGA or the fixed character set of MDA. It could address individual pixels, and displayed a black and white picture of 720 × 348 pixels. This resolution was superior to the CGA card, yet offered pixel-addressable graphics, so despite lacking color capability,

2010-473: The Hercules adapter's offer of high resolution bitmap graphics combined with MDA-grade text quality made it a popular choice, which was even shipped with many clones . MDA cards used a DE-9 output port intended for a digital TTL monitor, like the IBM monochrome monitor. The signal had the following specifications: Other boards offer MDA compatibility , although with differences on how attributes are displayed or

2077-474: The Hercules card uses the same signal timing as the MDA text mode. The Hercules graphics mode is similar to the CGA high-resolution ( 640 × 200 ) two-color mode; the video buffer contains a packed-pixel bitmap (eight pixels per byte, one bit per pixel) with the same byte format—including the pixel-to-bit mapping and byte order—as the CGA two-color graphics mode, and the video buffer is also split into interleaved banks, each 8 KB in size. However, because in

IBM Monochrome Display Adapter - Misplaced Pages Continue

2144-402: The Hercules graphics mode there are more than 256 scanlines and the display buffer size is nearly 32 KB (instead of 16 KB as in all CGA graphics modes), four interleaved banks are used in the Hercules mode instead of two as in the CGA modes. Also, to represent 720 pixels per line instead of 640 as on the CGA, each scanline has 90 bytes of pixel data instead of 80. The 64 KB RAM of

2211-399: The Hercules graphics mode. Though the graphics mode of the Hercules card is not CGA-compatible, it is similar enough to the two CGA graphics modes that with the use of third-party terminate-and-stay-resident programs it can also work with programs written for the CGA card's standard graphics modes. As the Hercules card does not actually have color-generating circuitry, nor can it connect to

2278-518: The MDA cannot address individual pixels to take full advantage of this resolution. Each character cell can be set to one of 256 bitmap characters stored in ROM on the card, and this character set cannot be altered from the built-in hardware code page 437 . The only way to simulate "graphics" is through ASCII art , obtaining a low resolution 80 × 25 "pixels" screen, based on character positions. Code page 437 has 256 characters (0-255), including

2345-475: The P996 specification. However, despite books being published on the P996 specification, it never officially progressed past draft status. There still is an existing user base with old computers, so some ISA cards are still manufactured, e.g. with USB ports or complete single-board computers based on modern processors, USB 3.0 , and SATA . Hercules Graphics Card The Hercules Graphics Card ( HGC )

2412-477: The PC (including text adventures ) and at least one game, IBM's One Hundred And One Monochrome Mazes , requires MDA. Box-drawing characters made the production of rudimentary graphics practical for early PC game titles, including BBS door games or titles such as Castle Adventure . Another use for the MDA was as a secondary display for debugging . Applications like SoftICE and the Windows debugger permitted

2479-515: The PC bus—the AT bus connector was a superset of the PC bus connector. In 1988, the 32-bit EISA standard was proposed by the "Gang of Nine" group of PC-compatible manufacturers that included Compaq. Compaq created the term Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) to replace PC compatible . In the process, they retroactively renamed the AT bus to ISA to avoid infringing IBM's trademark on its PC and PC/AT systems (and to avoid giving their major competitor, IBM, free advertisement). IBM designed

2546-477: The PCMCIA interface is much more complex than ATA. Although most modern computers do not have physical ISA buses, almost all PCs — IA-32 , and x86-64 — have ISA buses allocated in physical address space. Some Southbridges and some CPUs themselves provide services such as temperature monitoring and voltage readings through ISA buses as ISA devices. IEEE started a standardization of the ISA bus in 1985, called

2613-578: The XT-IDE-based peripheral hard drive and memory expansion unit A590 for their Amiga 500 and 500+ computers that also supported a SCSI drive. Later models – the A600 , A1200 , and the Amiga 4000 series – use AT-IDE drives. The PCMCIA specification can be seen as a superset of ATA. The standard for PCMCIA hard disk interfaces, which included PCMCIA flash drives, allows for the mutual configuration of

2680-545: The actual display of these levels is monitor-dependent: The MDA was released alongside the IBM Color Graphics Adapter , and in fact could be installed alongside the CGA in the same computer. A command included with PC DOS permitted switching the primary display between the CGA and MDA cards. Because of the lack of pixel-addressable graphics, MDA owners were unable to play PC games released with graphics support. However, textmode games were released for

2747-734: The address bits and address select signals in the ATA physical interface channel, and all operations of ATA hard disks are performed using the ATA-specified protocols through the ATA command set. The earliest versions of the ATA standard featured a few simple protocols and a basic command set comparable to the command sets of MFM and RLL controllers (which preceded ATA controllers), but the latest ATA standards have much more complex protocols and instruction sets that include optional commands and protocols providing such advanced optional-use features as sizable hidden system storage areas, password security locking, and programmable geometry translation. In

IBM Monochrome Display Adapter - Misplaced Pages Continue

2814-575: The basic command set which became the basis of the ATA interface (and which differed greatly from the interface of IBM's fixed disk controller card for the PC XT). Direct precursors to ATA were third-party ISA hardcards that integrated a hard disk drive (HDD) and a hard disk controller (HDC) onto one card. This was at best awkward and at worst damaging to the motherboard, as ISA slots were not designed to support such heavy devices as HDDs. The next generation of Integrated Drive Electronics drives moved both

2881-438: The creation of ISA PnP , a plug-n-play system that used a combination of modifications to hardware, the system BIOS , and operating system software to automatically manage resource allocations. In reality, ISA PnP could be troublesome and did not become well-supported until the architecture was in its final days. A PnP ISA, EISA or VLB device may have a 5-byte EISA ID (3-byte manufacturer ID + 2-byte hex number) to identify

2948-479: The device. For example, CTL0044 corresponds to Creative Sound Blaster 16 / 32 PnP . PCI slots were the first physically incompatible expansion ports to directly squeeze ISA off the motherboard. At first, motherboards were largely ISA, including a few PCI slots. By the mid-1990s, the two slot types were roughly balanced, and ISA slots soon were in the minority of consumer systems. Microsoft 's PC-99 specification recommended that ISA slots be removed entirely, though

3015-574: The drive and controller to a drive bay and used a ribbon cable and a very simple interface board to connect it to an ISA slot. ATA is basically a standardization of this arrangement plus a uniform command structure for software to interface with the HDC within the drive. ATA has since been separated from the ISA bus and connected directly to the local bus, usually by integration into the chipset, for much higher clock rates and data throughput than ISA could support. ATA has clear characteristics of 16-bit ISA, such as

3082-468: The end. In late 2008, even floppy disk drives and serial ports were disappearing, and the extinction of vestigial ISA (by then the LPC bus) from chipsets was on the horizon. PCI slots are rotated compared to their ISA counterparts—PCI cards were essentially inserted upside-down, allowing ISA and PCI connectors to squeeze together on the motherboard. Only one of the two connectors can be used in each slot at

3149-456: The font used. ISA card 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

3216-506: The graphics card market, second to IBM. Hercules-compatible graphics cards shipped as standard hardware with most PC clones . As a de facto standard , support in software was widespread. The Hercules Graphics Card had several versions. Several updated versions of the original Hercules Graphics Card exist. The original board from 1982 is referenced as GB100 , with updated versions in 1983 ( GB101 ), 1984 ( GB102 ) and 1988 ( GB102Z ). The Hercules Graphics Card Plus or HGC+ ( GB112 )

3283-449: The mid-1990s, the ATA host controller (usually integrated into the chipset) was moved to PCI form. A further deviation between ISA and ATA is that while the ISA bus remained locked into a single standard clock rate (for backward hardware compatibility), the ATA interface offered many different speed modes, could select among them to match the maximum speed supported by the attached drives, and kept adding faster speeds with later versions of

3350-576: The monochrome card in such a setup for maximum speed of the VGA card. The author of an internal IBM publication stated in October 1981 that he had planned to purchase the CGA adapter but changed his mind after seeing its poor display quality. Describing MDA as beautiful, he observed that "you stare at text a whole lot more than you stare at color graphics". MDA was more popular than CGA for business applications. The higher resolution of MDA's text and inclusion of

3417-464: The normally unconnected DE-9 video connector pins, theoretically allowing an 8-color display with a suitable monitor. The registers also allow the monochrome mode to be set on and off. No (widely) published software exists to actually control the feature. It is also possible to combine the values of output pins 7 ( Video) and 6 ( Intensity), to generate four brightness levels. Video corresponds to 2/3 luminance and Intensity to 1/3 luminance), but

SECTION 50

#1732779641469

3484-583: The original IBM AT) are likely to stick around for a while. As explained in the History section, ISA was the basis for development of the ATA interface, used for ATA (a.k.a. IDE) hard disks. Physically, ATA is essentially a simple subset of ISA, with 16 data bits, support for exactly one IRQ and one DMA channel, and 3 address bits. To this ISA subset, ATA adds two IDE address select ("chip select") lines (i.e. address decodes, effectively equivalent to address bits) and

3551-496: The port and the drive in an ATA mode. As a de facto extension, most PCMCIA flash drives additionally allow for a simple ATA mode that is enabled by pulling a single pin low, so that PCMCIA hardware and firmware are unnecessary to use them as an ATA drive connected to an ATA port. PCMCIA flash drive to ATA adapters are thus simple and inexpensive but are not guaranteed to work with any and every standard PCMCIA flash drive. Further, such adapters cannot be used as generic PCMCIA ports, as

3618-487: The same time, up to 4 devices may use one 8-bit DMA channel each, while up to 3 devices can use one 16-bit DMA channel each. Originally, the bus clock was synchronous with the CPU clock, resulting in varying bus clock frequencies among the many different IBM clones on the market (sometimes as high as 16 or 20 MHz), leading to software or electrical timing problems for certain ISA cards at bus speeds they were not designed for. Later motherboards or integrated chipsets used

3685-412: The screen. These are invisible, underline, normal, bright (bold), reverse video, and blinking . Reverse video swaps the foreground and background colors, while blinking causes text to flash periodically. Some of these attributes can be combined, so that e.g. bright, underlined text can be rendered. Early versions of the MDA board have hardware capable of outputting red, green and blue TTL signals on

3752-556: The simultaneous use of an MDA and another graphics card, with the MDA displaying a debugger interface while the other card was showing the primary display. A typical 8-bit monochrome card could turn the 16-bit 8 MHz ISA bus into an 8-bit 4 MHz PC bus , which resulted in having the bus bandwidth cut by up to 75%. If the monochrome card was added to the PC as a second card besides a normal VGA card for debugging purposes, this resulted in slow VGA performance. Microsoft recommended in its Writing HOT Games for Microsoft Windows (1994) to remove

3819-463: The standard 95 printable ASCII characters from (32-126), and the 33 ASCII control codes (0-31 and 127) are replaced with printable graphic symbols. It also includes another 128 characters (128-255) like the aforementioned characters for drawing forms. Some of these shapes appear in Unicode as box-drawing characters . There are several attribute values - bit flags that can be set on each character on

3886-447: The system architecture still required ISA to be present in some vestigial way internally to handle the floppy drive , serial ports , etc., which was why the software compatible LPC bus was created. ISA slots remained for a few more years, and towards the turn of the century it was common to see systems with an Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) sitting near the central processing unit , an array of PCI slots, and one or two ISA slots near

3953-478: The system. While a handful of devices were essentially plug-n-play , this was rare. Users frequently had to configure parameters when adding a new device, such as the IRQ line, I/O address , or DMA channel. MCA had done away with this complication and PCI actually incorporated many of the ideas first explored with MCA, though it was more directly descended from EISA. This trouble with configuration eventually led to

4020-490: The two sockets into one unit. These can be found in almost every AT-class PC manufactured after the mid-1980s. The ISA slot connector is typically black (distinguishing it from the brown EISA connectors and white PCI connectors). Motherboard devices have dedicated IRQs (not present in the slots). 16-bit devices can use either PC-bus or PC/AT-bus IRQs. It is therefore possible to connect up to 6 devices that use one 8-bit IRQ each and up to 5 devices that use one 16-bit IRQ each. At

4087-495: Was backward-compatible with software written for the earlier monochrome Hercules cards. The Hercules Color Card ( GB200 ) was a CGA-compatible video board and should not be confused with the InColor Card. This board could coexist with the HGC and still allow both graphics pages to be used. It would detect when the second graphics page was selected and disable access to its own memory, which would otherwise have been at

SECTION 60

#1732779641469

4154-507: Was developed by a team led by Mark Dean at IBM as part of the IBM PC project in 1981. It was an 8-bit bus based on the I/O bus of the IBM System/23 Datamaster system - it used the same physical connector, and a similar signal protocol and pinout. A 16-bit version, the IBM AT bus, was introduced with the release of the IBM PC/AT in 1984. The AT bus was a mostly backward-compatible extension of

4221-545: Was introduced with the IBM PC/AT . This bus was officially termed I/O Channel by IBM. It extends the XT-bus by adding a second shorter edge connector in-line with the eight-bit XT-bus connector, which is unchanged, retaining compatibility with most 8-bit cards. The second connector adds four additional address lines for a total of 24, and 8 additional data lines for a total of 16. It also adds new interrupt lines connected to

4288-494: Was limited to 128 KiB sections, leading to problems when mixing 8- and 16-bit cards as they could not co-exist in the same 128 KiB area. This is because the MEMCS16 line is required to be set based on the value of LA17-23 only. ISA is still used today for specialized industrial purposes. In 2008, IEI Technologies released a modern motherboard for Intel Core 2 Duo processors which, in addition to other special I/O features,

4355-765: Was not very successful, however. Later buses such as VESA Local Bus and PCI were used instead, often along with ISA slots on the same mainboard . Derivatives of the AT bus structure were and still are used in ATA/IDE , the PCMCIA standard, CompactFlash , the PC/104 bus, and internally within Super I/O chips. Even though ISA disappeared from consumer desktops many years ago, it is still used in industrial PCs , where certain specialized expansion cards that never transitioned to PCI and PCI Express are used. The original PC bus

4422-584: Was released in June 1986 at an original retail price of $ 299. It was an enhancement of the HGC, adding support for redefinable fonts called RAMFONT in MDA -compatible text mode. It was based around a specialty chip designed by Hercules Computer Technology, unlike the original Hercules Graphics Card, which used standard components. Software support included Lotus 1-2-3  v2, Symphony  1.1, Framework II and Microsoft Word  3. In 1988 Hercules released

4489-756: Was used long after more technically capable systems had entered the market, especially on dual-monitor setups. The Hercules Graphics Card was released to fill a gap in the IBM video product lineup. When the IBM Personal Computer was launched in 1981, it had two graphics cards available: the Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) and the Monochrome Display And Printer Adapter (MDA). CGA offered low-resolution ( 320 × 200 ) color graphics and medium-resolution ( 640 × 200 ) monochrome graphics, while MDA offers

#468531