> will someone please explain what a VLB motherboard is?

        Vesa Local Bus. In the days of the 486 to Pentium transition there were two
competing standards for a higher speed local bus (well three if you count
EISA but EISA never really caught on outside of the server market. Microbus
(I think that is what it was called) by IBM could also have been considered
a contender but being IBM only I don't think it had any chance and it wasn't
much faster than ISA). VLB consisted of a standard 16bit ISA slot with a 32
bit VESA slot on the end of the ISA. It was great for the reason that every
slot that was a VLB slot could take a standard ISA card instead. It lost,
for various reasons. The first was the cards were VERY long and prone to
slipping out of the slot (which I have experienced many times). Also the bus
was tied directly to the CPUs bus (no buffer of any type) which meant alot
of instabilities could be introduced to the system by a bad card. Bus length
was very short, subsequently the max number of slots I've ever seen was 3. I
believe only one slot could be a bus master, I don't know if PCI has a
similar constraint. Also, the VLB had big compatibility problems with the
Pentium architecture, I don't remember the details. I think the biggest
reason it lost is because Intel was a major supporter of PCI (maybe even the
creator), and we all know Intel's influence back then. Most of the late 486
boards were VLB, while most of the Pentiums were PCI (although there were a
few PCI 486 boards and a few VLB Pentium boards). TTYL

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