Early multifunction cards were created for
S-100 computers such as the
Altair 8800. One of the first is the popular
Processor Technology 3P+S that first appeared in 1976. It offers one serial port and three parallel ports. Multifunction cards had their heyday in the 1980s, especially with the rise of the
IBM Personal Computer, which initially required several dedicated expansion cards for basic functionality (such as outputting video and controlling the disk drives), leaving few vacant slots for the user to install additional cards. Multifunction cards were also popular among
Apple II users. The most popular of the early multifunction cards was the
AST SixPakPlus for the IBM PC, which combines a serial card,
parallel printer card, a RTC card, and a 384-KB-maximum RAM card. It spawned a
cottage industry unto itself of so-called "SixPak clones", which closely mimicked its design and capabilities. With
desktop computers, multifunction card became increasingly obsolete as the functionality of these cards began to be integrated into the
motherboards of PCs, a trend that started in the late 1980s and solidified by the early 2000s. With
laptops and
subnotebooks, the multifunction card concept persisted for several more years with
PC Cards; many laptops had only one or two slots for such cards, leading to many manufacturers developing multifunction PC Cards that, for example, combined
modem cards with memory-expansion cards. ==References==