History of the Motherboard

thanks for watching tech quickie click the subscribe button then enable notifications with the Bell icon so you won't miss any future videos these days just adding a CPU a stick of RAM a storage device and a power supply to a mini ITX motherboard will give you a small and fully functional computer in a matter of minutes and this is possible because of how many different functions the average motherboard combines into one little slab of like fiberglass metal and silicon but it wasn't always like this in fact early electronics didn't have anything resembling the lovely green boards with black integrated circuits that were used to today instead it was common to see individual full sized wires linking every capacitor resistor and other component necessary to make up a full computer system unsurprisingly this approach took up tons of space added a bunch of weight and was relatively fragile meaning that the printed circuit board took off in popularity pretty quickly starting in the 1950s it should be noted however that these early PCBs were still a far cry from the RGB motherboard that you might have sitting in your computer right now while back then a simple device like a radio might have gotten away with using just one PCB full-fledged computers needed many circuit boards to handle different functions connected by a backplane that you might consider to be a forerunner of the modern motherboard unlike true motherboards though these back planes tended to be dumb connections with no actual logic that consisted of little more than a bunch of slots lined up in a row so that other expansion cards could be plugged in for example the Altair 8800 used one slot to insert a processor another for memory and so on it wasn't until 1981 that we got a big upgrade the planar board in the original IBM PC featured an Intel 8088 CPU built in memory and actual external IO so it was far more than just a glorified bundle of wire like smooshed together all you could connect directly to it was a keyboard and a cassette drive but it also included a handful of expansion slots that didn't look too different from what we're used to today and those slots were important because motherboards were still so simple that they didn't have features that we consider basic now like drive headers for example so if you wanted to load up your copy of flight simulator 1.0 you would need a standalone disk interface card and we didn't see modern memory modules that fit into RAM slots until the mid-1980s either by the late 80s though engineers had fully embraced the goal of integrating more and more functions onto the motherboard and so little ICS called super i/o chips were becoming more common these functioned like rudimentary versions of a modern chipset they provided drive controllers ports for printers mice keyboards and other devices and the systems bios now that all doesn't sound like a huge deal today but super i/o chips took up less space and they were much more cost effective than expansion cards setting the stage for full-featured modern motherboards around the same time in 1987 specifically we've got the first ever integrated VGA graphics chips when IBM released model 50 of their almost famous personal system - unlike modern integrated GPUs though this was a chip that was affixed to the motherboard instead of being built into the CPU itself a paradigm that we saw again starting in the mid-1990s as 3d GPUs like the s3 trio and the ati rage series appeared on motherboards obviating the need for a separate card for basic use though GPUs that were soldered onto motherboards began to disappear in favor of ones built into CPUs by the mid 2010 speaking of CPUs let's jump back again to 1989 when the first CPU socket with a vaguely modern look socket 1 appeared alongside Intel's wildly popular 486 processor while earlier designs involved soldering the CPU directly to the board or significant force on the part of the user to insert or remove them socket one had a simple mechanism based around a pin grid array very similar to modern AMD sockets though with a mere 169 pins but it wasn't just CPU sockets that were getting a facelift expansion slots were also changing at that time and it was about time as the ancient is a standard had been used since the days of the original IBM PC in 1994 PCI started becoming popular in consumer pcs followed by the short-lived AGP for graphics cards in 1997 and PCI Express which is still with us today in 2004 but what about onboard networking in audio well in the mid 1980s there were a number of proprietary networking protocols but since the now-familiar Ethernet was a relatively simple standard with easy physical construction it became the go-to for networking in the late 80s and again its simplicity meant that it quickly spread to PC motherboards in the early 1990s and although sound cards also started appearing on the market in the late 80s and early 90s and we had little internal speakers that could emit beeps and bleeps for a while we didn't see true fully functional onboard digital sound hit the mainstream until 1999 when Intel included the AC 97 standard in its 810 chipset which incidentally was also the first Intel chipset to include integrated graphics meaning it was no longer necessary to have a separate chip for video processing be it on the motherboard or on an adapter card so now that all of these innovations had a clear home on the PC motherboard the stage was set for refinements made possible by decreasing costs and the continued miniaturization of components not to mention an increase in processing capacity to handle lots of different features meaning that these days even small form-factor motherboards feature RGB headers premium power delivery and Wi-Fi and of course by lear the 2010 manufacturers also realized that all those bells and whistles are meaningless without some vaguely threatening heatsinks to show all comers that you mean business speaking of meaning business do you mean business when it comes to keeping prying eyes away from your online activity then check out private Internet access VPN not only does P ia work on up to five devices at once hiding your true IP address it allows you to bypass to your restrictions and censorship by making you appear as though you are connecting from somewhere else and it's got all kinds of other great functionality too it blocks unwanted connections to help prevent attacks it Auto blocks all traffic if the VPN disconnects it keeps your data out of the hands of advertisers and other snoops who are tracking your activity it prevents DNS leaks and even includes mace P is built-in malware blocker it supports multiple VPN protocols and they've got apps for Windows Mac Android iOS Linux and even a Chrome extension with support for more platforms coming soon P ia has over 3,000 servers in 28 countries and doesn't log user activity so what are you waiting for check them out today at the link below so thanks for watching guys you can just like like you can check out other channels you can leave a comment if you have a suggestion for a future fast as possible and you can subscribe so you don't miss any videos here on tech Ricky over there I don't where the button is

Channel: Techquickie

Views: 1,903,606

Keywords: motherboard, pc, computer, hardware, pcb, planar board, backplane, super i/o, memory, cpu, chipset, port, bios, ps/2, ibm, gpu, ati, rage, s3, trio, socket, 486, ethernet, expansion, slot, isa, pci, pci express, agp, rgb, power phases, wi-fi, adapter, card, history

Id: Mw6ha5wxJUI

Length: 8min 7sec (487 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 17 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/dylan522p]

This is a uniquely not annoying Linus Tech Tips video.

[u/[deleted]]

The second picture had me worried