RAM card

A RAM card is a computer peripheral card that accommodates RAM chips, often beyond those installable on the motherboard. In the early days of IBM-compatible personal computers, especially in the PC/XT era, size limitations and hence limitations in both the number of onboard DRAM sockets and their upgradability meant users wishing to upgrade their computers to the full 640K (or beyond) often needed to install an ISA RAM card. With the development of higher-capacity RAM and more modern IC packaging, as well as RAM-specific daughterboards (memory modules) like SIPPs, SIMMs and DIMMs, later computers mostly no longer required the addition of a full-size peripheral card to max-out the RAM. However, some RAM card offerings remained available as specialised solutions, e.g. for installation and use in certain servers. Such ISA (or later PCI) cards may in turn accommodate SIMMs or DIMMs – technically daughterboards on daughterboards, though not generally referred to as such.

RAM cards are not to be confused with RAM disks, though some RAM cards came with software that allowed some of their memory being configured as a RAM disk.

Some early RAM cards were (also) EMS cards: They were a hardware option to supply Expanded Memory to machines that could not run an EMS emulator. These cards came before the emulators. It was the behaviour of these specification-compliant physical RAM cards which executables like EMM386.EXE were later emulating. Not all RAM cards were EMS cards, but a RAM card capable of upgrading the PC beyond the 640K limit might have been configurable to supply any further RAM as expanded memory (EMS memory). Otherwise RAM above e.g. a 286 PC's conventional memory was often configured as XMS.

Many ISA multifunction cards also had RAM card functionality.

External links

• Some very early IBM RAM cards

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