29 Feb
2016
29 Feb
'16
9:21 a.m.
Computers existed way before 1980, and had many boards plugged into
wire-wrapped backplanes or motherboards. I'm guessing the terminology
was company-specific. IBM had their own name for EVERYTHING, for
instance. They did NOT use the term motherboard, as far as I know. The
SMS systems like 709x, 1401, etc. had totally passive backplanes. The SLT
systems (System/360, 1130/1800, etc.) had passive backplanes, but the local
interconnect was done mostly with etched traces on multilayer PC boards,
which also distributed power to the cards. They just called these
backplane sections "boards" and the SLT circuit boards that plugged into
them were "cards". Not sure where I first saw the term motherboard, or if
it really implied it had substantial active circuitry on it.
FWIW, the IBM term for "motherboard" was "planar", at least in
the era of
the PC, PC/XT, PC/AT, etc.
The first computer to which I had access was my father's 5150 in
approximately 1984; I remember the
machine came with dual floppy drives and a 64K system planar with an Intel
8088. At some point, a
technician came out and put in a different planar with 256K on-board, added
an additional 256K via
expansion board, and configured it with a 30MB half-height Winchester drive
and controller. This second
planar had an AMD D8088 at the same 4.77MHz speed as the original.
Having this machine handed down to me in about 1991 sparked my interest in
programming; many hours
of BASICA silliness and PC-DOS batch file frustration followed.