My ISA Card, LISA

A picture of the card

This ISA card was my first real hardware project. The ISA slot, for the uninititated, was the original proprietary slot on the IBM XT. This lowly eight-bit slot became known as the Industry Standard Architecture. This slot is mostly responsible for the sad, convoluted state of the IBM PC hardware today-- users and software have to negotiate IRQs, I/O Base addresses, and DMA channels.

But this simple, user-unfriendly architecture is really easy to build hardware for. Hence, mostly to get my hands dirty and actually solder some hardware, I built an ISA card. It provides 8 TTL-level outputs and accepts 8 TTL-level inputs, but is extensible in case I ever want to add other inputs and outputs. I'll hook up an analog to digital converter sometime soon.

You can read many technical details about the construction and layout of the card here, or download the TTL Pinout list I used during its construction. The name "LISA", as you might guess, comes from "Orion Lawlor's Industry Standard Architecture" card.


Back to Orion's Oeuvre.
Back to Orion's Home Page.