Futurebus (IEEE 896) is a computer bus standard designed to replace all local bus connections in a computer, including the CPU, plug-in cards, and even some LAN links between machines.
It can connect a CPU and RAM to VME on separate cards to build a computer.
However, as the speed of the CPUs and RAM rapidly increased, Futurebus created a successor to VMEbus using asynchronous links.
Though the ability to have several cards in the system as "masters", allowing Futurebus to build multiprocessor machines, required some form of "distributed arbitration" to allow the various cards to gain access to the bus at any point, as opposed to VME, which put a single master in slot 0 with overall control.
Futurebus+ FDDI boards are still supported in the OpenVMS operating system.