Draft:Multifunction card

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Last edited by Significa liberdade (talk | contribs) 5 months ago. (Update)
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The multifunction card and/or multi-I/O card was a commonly-installed

RAM card

, stealing yet another slot or two. Running out of expansion slots for essential functionality was thus a real possibility. IBM recognised and responded to the problem by increasing the number of ISA slots to eight in the XT, but it was still possible to run out of those. To help prevent that, third-party vendors were quick to offer peripherals that combined many of the frequently-desired or required features on a single card.

These feature included:

serial ports
a parallel port
a
floppy disk controller
a real-time clock, often with button cell battery backup
RAM card
functionality
a game port
possibly a
IDE, rarely SCSI

At a minimum, a multi-I/O card offered two serial ports and one parallel port. Such limited multifunction cards were generally just called multi-I/O cards. Most multifunction cards commonly thusly named offered more, but not all multifunction cards offered everything. Technically IBM's

PCI bus arrived, the pressing need for them had mostly disappeared. The multifunction cards described herein enjoyed their greatest popularity in the 1980s and at most early 1990s. The fashionable trend to prefer slimline cases (with riser cards

and fewer available slots) which peaked around the turn of the decade (late 1980s/early 1990s) temporarily once again increased the demand for multifunction cards, giving them a second wind towards the end, but following that, the multifunction card as a generally-recognised identifiable class of PC peripherals largely disappeared.

Multifunction cards should not be confused with multi-function card units or machines; altogether different IBM technologies that preceded the

punch card

processing functions.

This computer hardware article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.