Early types of expansion buses

Most motherboards these days come with some flavor of PCI as expansion ports. You need to know the details about those, but you should also familiarize yourself with earlier expansion buses. Probably the most common expansion bus pre-PCI was ISA, Industry Standard Architecture. It worked in the 8-bit and 16-bit worlds. EISA, Extended Industry Standard Architecture, was developed to handle 32-bit paths. It was developed in response to MCA, Micro Channel Architecture, which was developed by IBM. IBM, however, kept didn't really open the standard at all and made PC manufacturers pay royalty fees to use it. That kind of thing doesn't really go over to well in the PC world. You may also see mention of the VL-Bus or VESA Local bus. By and large, you will not see any of these types of expansion buses on motherboards today.