Why were 90s PC expansion cards SO HUGE?!

This is a classic VESA Local Bus (VLB) Multi-I/O controller card, a crucial companion for 486-era motherboards. Back in the mid-1990s, motherboards rarely had built-in ports, so this dedicated expansion card handled all data transfer for hard drives, floppy drives, and peripherals. Thanks to the VLB interface, it provided a direct, high-speed 32-bit pipeline to the CPU, significantly boosting IDE hard drive performance.
Main Controller: Powered by the Winbond W83787F Super I/O chip, which manages the floppy disk drive (FDC), parallel (LPT), and serial (COM) interfaces.
Board Markings: Identified by the PCB numbers KAOS 1336-001-01 and VL4DDGW/S1336 REV: F.
Connectivity:
On-board pin headers for internal FDD CONN (Floppy), HDD CONN (IDE), COM2, and LPT.
Rear bracket features external COM1 (9-pin serial) and LPT (25-pin parallel) ports.
Logic Architecture: Equipped with Goldstar (GS) logic gates and programmable array logic chips (PAL16V8 types marked as PAL3, PAL4, PAL5) to handle bus mastering and timing.
#VL4DDGW #S1336 #KAOS1336 #Winbond #W83787F #WinbondW83787F #VLB #VESALocalBus #MultiIO #IOController #IDEController #FDDController #COMPort #LPTPort #GoldstarGS #PAL16V8 #RetroHardware #VintagePC #486PC #RetroComputing #IOCard #ISAvlb #HardwareHobbyist #90sTech

Видео Why were 90s PC expansion cards SO HUGE?! канала Downgrade