Zorro bus
More info
- Creator
- Commodore
- Type
- Expansion bus
- Released
- 1987 (Zorro II)
The Amiga's expansion bus, which configured its own cards a decade before the PC discovered plug and play.
Zorro was the expansion bus in the big Amiga models. Zorro II (1987, Amiga 2000) was 16-bit; Zorro III (1990, Amiga 3000) was 32-bit, partly designed by Dave Haynie. The genuinely forward-looking part was AutoConfig: cards announced their memory needs at boot and the OS placed them with no jumpers or driver wrangling — exactly what the PC world would later call "plug and play" and hail as new in 1995. Zorro cards gave the Amiga everything from networking and SCSI to graphics boards. The bus died with Commodore's 1994 bankruptcy, but lives on in niche modern builds.