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Top ten obsolete ports

By Ian Morris on 25 March 2008, 12:02pm

ISA
Okay, okay, we admit it. ISA isn't a port at all, it's a bus. A very, very clunky one. It had only the most rudimentary support for Plug and Play -- essentially, to make it work, you put the card in the slot and if your PC didn't explode, or Windows didn't delete itself, you might be able to get a driver off a CD or maybe even the Internet. If you could brave ultra-slow dial-up, that is, and it wasn't a modem you were trying to install in the first place.

That said, there were some things ISA was great at. Namely things that required a more pedestrian attitude to matters of speed. It was especially well equipped to handle mice, 9,600 baud modems and at a push TV tuner cards that used the port for power only and passed their video to a PCI graphics card.

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