Plug and Play - ISA and PCI Self-configuration

ISA and PCI Self-configuration

In time, many Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) cards incorporated, through proprietary and varied techniques, hardware to self-configure or to provide for software configuration; often the card came with a configuration program on disk that could automatically set the software-configurable (but not itself self-configuring) hardware. Some cards had both jumpers and software-configuration, with some settings controlled by each; this compromise reduced the number of jumpers that had to be set, while avoiding great expense for certain settings, e.g. nonvolatile registers for a base address setting. The problems of required jumpers continued on but slowly diminished as more and more devices, both ISA and other types, included extra self-configuration hardware. However, these efforts still did not solve the problem of making sure the end-user has the appropriate software driver for the hardware.

ISA PnP or (legacy) Plug & Play ISA was a plug-n-play system that used a combination of modifications to hardware, the system BIOS, and operating system software to automatically manage resource allocations. It was superseded by the PCI bus during the mid-1990s.