History of the Motherboard
A computer was usually built in a case or mainframe with components connected by a backplane consisting of a set of slots themselves connected with wires. The CPU, memory and I/O components were housed on individual PCBs or cards which plugged into the backplane. During the late 1980s and 1990s, it became economical to move an increasing number of secondary functions onto the motherboard. In the late 1980s, motherboards began to include single ICs capable of supporting a set of low-speed peripherals: keyboard, mouse, floppy disk drive, serial ports, and parallel ports. With the arrival of the microprocessor, it became more cost-effective to place the backplane connectors, processor and glue logic onto a single board(mother), with video, memory and I/O functions on cards therefore the terms “motherboard” and daughterboard. The Apple II computer featured a motherboard with 8 expansion slots.
