Industry Standard Architecture bus, the bus architecture used in the IBM PC/XT and PC/AT. The AT version of the bus is called the AT bus and became a de facto industry standard. Starting in the early 90s, ISA was being replaced by the PCI local bus architecture. The ISA bus is still used in industrial computers, but the most modern computers do not have an ISA bus anymore.

Line Print Terminal, also known as printer port, this port is mainly used to connect printers, but can also be used for other devices like scanners.

Peripheral Component Interconnect was developed in the early 90s as the successor of the ISA bus, because a faster bus system was needed. Nowadays most modern computers contain several PCI slots.

More information can be found at the PCI Special Interest Group Website.

PCI eXtensions for Instrumentation is a modular instrumentation platform designed specifically for measurement and automation applications. With PXI, you can select the modules you need to integrate into a single PXI system from multiple vendors. Communication between the modules uses familiar PC-based technologies such as the 132 MB/s PCI bus, allowing high performance communication that leverages widely available software. PXI also integrates timing and synchronization into the system, so that you can pass signals between instruments for high performance and accuracy, without additional cabling.

More information can be found at the PXI Systems Alliance website.

Universal Serial Bus is an interface bus to connect devices to a computer. USB facilitates bus power to power the device. It is a 'hot-swappable' bus, which means that you can connect and disconnect devices while the PC is running. The USB 2.0 standard supports three transfer rates:

• 1.5 Mbit/s Low Speed
• 12 Mbit/s High Speed
• 480 Mbit/s Full Speed

All TiePie engineering USB instruments support 480 Mbit/s Full speed data transfer.

More information can be found at USB.org