GIO

GIO is a computer bus standard developed by SGI and used in a variety of their products in the 1990s as their primary expansion system.

GIO was similar in concept to competing standards such as NuBus or (later) PCI, but saw little use outside SGI and severely limited the devices available on their platform as a result.

Specifically the external connector (the metal flange) was identical to EISA, but the shape of the board itself was slightly different.

Internally the non-pipelined bus transferred data between the various parts of the computer, including GIO cards, EISA devices, SCSI and so forth.

For low-throughput cards, GIO32-bis allowed a single device to be used on any machine supporting GIO, no matter what generation.