It did not take long after the first microprocessors to arrive on the market before the first single-board computers arrived, for instance
Intel's own
SIM4-01 and SIM8-01 development boards from 1971 and 1972 respectively. The SIM8-01 board is based on the
Intel 8008 and contains a CPU, RAM, ROM, and a TTY terminal interface. It features 1K byte of RAM in 32 P1101A chips and 2K bytes of
EPROM in eight C1701 chips. The SIM8-01 has input and output capabilities in the form of a serial port for an external terminal, and it can be argued that this is the first true single-board computer in that sense. Following a similar concept with CPU/RAM/ROM and a terminal interface, there was the Intel 8080-based
MYCRO-1 released in December 1974, and both the Intel SDK-80 and the Motorola MEK6800D1 of 1975. A cheaper and subsequently more popular single-board computer, the
KIM-1 based on the MOS
6502, would be announced later in 1975 and released in 1976. Early SBCs figured heavily in the early history of
home computers, such as the
Acorn Electron and the
BBC Micro, also developed by Acorn. Other typical early single-board computers like the
KIM-1 were often shipped without
enclosure, which had to be added by the owner. Other early examples are the
Ferguson Big Board, the
Ampro Little Board, and the
Nascom. Many home computers in the 1980s were single-board computers, with some even encouraging owners to solder upgraded components directly to pre-marked points on the board. As the PC became more prevalent, SBCs decreased in market share due to their low extensibility. The rapid adoption of
IBM's standards for peripherals and the standardization of the
PCI bus in the 1990s made motherboards and compatible components and peripherals cheap and ubiquitous, while the development of multimedia platforms such as the
CD-ROM and
Sound Blaster cards had begun to fast outpace the rate at which users needed to replace their personal computers. These two trends disincentivized single-board computers, and instead encouraged the proliferation of
motherboards, which typically housed the
CPU and other core components, with peripheral components such as hard disk drive controllers and
graphics processors, and even some core components such as
RAM modules, located on
daughterboards. Computers began to move back towards fewer boards in the 2000s. As new standards like
USB dramatically reduced the variety of peripheral standards motherboards were expected to support, advances in
integrated circuit manufacturing provided new chipsets which could provide the functionality of many daughterboards, particularly
I/O, in a single chip. By the end of the decade, PC motherboards offered on-board support for disk drives including
IDE,
SATA,
NVMe,
RAID, integrated
GPU,
Ethernet, and traditional I/O such as
serial port and
parallel port,
USB, and keyboard/mouse support. Plug-in "cards" retained their importance as high performance components, such as physically large and complex
graphics coprocessors, high-end
RAID controllers, and specialized I/O cards such as
data acquisition and
DSP boards. The 2010s were defined by rapid and sustained growth in single-board computers, enabled largely by advances in integrated circuit production techniques that made it possible for the first time to include most or all of the core components of a motherboard on a
single integrated circuit die. One of the more well known single-board-computers of the decade was the
Raspberry Pi, which was built around a custom
Broadcom SoC with
open-source drivers. Originally intended for education, the Raspberry Pi contained a number of features, such as optimized
Linux support and programmable
GPIO pins, that were also greatly appealing to
hobbyists, who used the Pi, and other comparable SBCs, for projects such as
home automation,
video game emulation,
media streaming, and other experimentation. In industry, the rapid growth of
smartphones and other small-scale devices encouraged hardware manufacturers to move towards more frequent use of SoCs and the reduction of motherboards in size, extensibility and complexity, while the proliferation of the
Internet of Things increased demand for small, cheap components that would allow unconventional devices to access the Internet. Both of these factors dramatically increased production of single-board computers throughout the decade. By the end of the 2010s and the early 2020s, many devices, including smartphones,
tablet computers,
laptops and other smart devices, are powered by single-board computers which utilize advanced SoCs (
System on a Chip). While this has greatly increased performance and power efficiency, it has raised concerns that single-board computers, particularly those built around SoCs, are harder to repair and may be less friendly to attempts to monitor or modify instructions programmed into the boards by manufacturers. ==Applications==