Motherboard (Was: The Burroughs B5900 and E-Mode

On Thu, 15 Oct 2015, Mark Linimon wrote: Wasn't the B5900 from 1980? "Motherboard" was around then, although Burroughs might not have used it. Burroughs might very well have been more inclined to call it "backplane". "The earliest known reference to motherboard, the main circuit board of a personal computer, comes from a 1971 article in the British journal Electrical and Electronics Abstracts, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The article refers to one daughterboard mounted vertically on a computer size motherboard." from: http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2007/01/the-mother-of-all-boards.html Google is not my friend today. I'm encountering multiple variants of "in the 1980s and 1990s, it became popular to put peripheral controllers on the board", red and blue text overlayed on a full color picture, "IBM PC was the first motherboard" (especially amusing since it was similar form factor and basic layout as Apple][) S100 backplane was often called a "motherboard". By 1978, the Apple ][ main board was called a "motherboard" in the industry, although IIRC, Apple preferred to call it a "logic board". IBM explicitly refused to call it a "motherboard" on the 5150. According to an unreliable source (my late uncle working there at the time), that was due to horrified shock at TV coverage of Black Panther speeches at Merritt College in Oakland in the late 1960s (when I had attended) and on, that had very extensive use of the word "MOTHERFUCKER", shortened to "MOTHER__" on TV. "UP AGAINST THE WALL MOTHER__!" To avoid association, IBM refused to call it a "motherboard". In the late 1960s, Merritt College had a 1401 and a 1620. Some say that Peralta Community College District's decision to move Merritt College up into the suburban hills in 1972? was in order to pull the campus out from under the Panthers. In early 1980s, Merritt College had a DEC with a rarely working third party drive, and then switched to 5150s in 1983. I taught up on the hill for 20 years, starting in 1983 (total of more than 30 years teaching in the PCCD system) -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com