NuBus

NuBus (/ˈn(j)uˌbʌs/) is a 32-bit parallel computer bus, originally developed at MIT and standardized in 1987 as a part of the NuMachine workstation project.

The NuBus was later incorporated in Lisp products by Texas Instruments (Explorer), and used as the main expansion bus by Apple Computer and a variant called NeXTBus was developed by NeXT.

Looking to avoid such problems in the future, NuBus was designed to be independent of the processor, its general architecture and any details of its I/O handling.

This was seen as making the bus "future-proof", as it was generally believed that 32-bit systems would arrive in the near future while 64-bit buses and beyond would remain impractical and excessive.

In order to select the proper device driver, NuBus included an ID scheme that allowed the cards to identify themselves to the host computer during startup.

While this is a trivial exercise today, one that all newer buses require, in the 1980s NuBus was considered needlessly complex and expensive.

This version used a standard DIN 41612 96-pin three-row connector, running the system on a 10 MHz clock for a maximum burst throughput of 40 MB/s and average speeds of 10 to 20 MB/s.

NuBus was also selected by Apple Computer for use in their Macintosh II project, where its plug-n-play nature fit well with the Mac philosophy of ease-of-use.