Return To Castle Intel: 16 Years Of Motherboard HistoryThe Plato motherboard was famous within Intel for being the first model to sell over one million units for the company. It was also a sign of the times that boards should be loaded with as many slots as possible—five ISA and three PCI in this case. Maximum expansion capability, summed up by the phrase “slots and watts,” was both a sign of coolness as well as a practical necessity since practically nothing was built into the board. Not how close together the last PCI slot is to the ISA slot on the board’s edge. This was one of the first instances of a shared slot design, in which either slot could make use of one opening in the chassis’s rear.
Other curiosities: Notice how there are no plastic walls around the floppy and hard disk headers on Plato, although there were on Batman? This is an odd step backward since it was all too easy to bend pins during cable attachment and removal. Enough bending and you’d snap a pin or two clean off. And do you see that power connector between the fourth ISA and first PCI slots? Not even the oldest of the Intel old timers helping us could remember what that was for. Bonus kudos to anyone who can solve the mystery in our feedback section.
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