Background of the motherboard
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The original IBM computer contained the original motherboard. In this design, which showed in 1982, the motherboard itself was a large printed circuit card that contained the 8088 microprocessor, the BIOS, sockets for the CPU's RAM and a collection of slots that auxiliary card could plug into. If you wanted to add a floppy disk drive or a parallel port or a joystick, you bought a separate card and plugged it into one of the slots. This approach was pioneered in the mass market by the Apple II machine. By making it easy to add cards, Apple and IBM accomplished two huge things:
They made it easy to add new features to the machine over time.
They opened the computer to creative opportunities for third-party ventors.
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