Editing VMEbus (section)

===VME early years===
The architectural concepts of the VMEbus are based on VERSAbus,<ref name="vitavme" /> developed in the late 1970s by Motorola. This was later renamed "VME", short for Versa Module European, by Lyman (Lym) Hevle, then a VP with the Motorola Microsystems Operation. (He was later the founder of the VME Marketing Group, itself subsequently renamed to VME International Trade Association, or VITA). 

John Black of Motorola, Craig MacKenna of Mostek and Cecil Kaplinsky of Signetics developed the first draft of the VMEbus specification. In October 1981, at the System '81 trade show in Munich, West Germany, Motorola, Mostek, Signetics/Philips, and Thomson CSF announced their joint support of the VMEbus. They also placed Revision A of the specification in the public domain. 

In 1985, Aitech developed, under contract for [[US Army]] [[TACOM]], the first conduction-cooled 6U VMEbus board.  Although electrically providing a compliant VMEbus protocol interface, mechanically, this board was not interchangeable for use in air-cooled lab VMEbus development chassis.

In late 1987, a technical committee was formed under VITA under the direction of IEEE to create the first military, conduction-cooled 6U{{nbsp}}× 160{{nbsp}}mm, fully electrically and mechanically compatible, VMEbus board co-chaired by Dale Young (DY4 Systems) and Doug Patterson (Plessey Microsystems, then Radstone Technology).  ANSI/IEEE-1101.2-1992 was later ratified and released in 1992 and remains in place as the conduction-cooled, international standard for all 6U VMEbus products.

In 1989, John Peters of Performance Technologies Inc. developed the initial concept of VME64: multiplexing address and data lines (A64/D64) on the VMEbus. The concept was demonstrated the same year and placed in the VITA Technical Committee in 1990 as a performance enhancement to the VMEbus specification.

In 1993, new activities began on the base-VME architecture, involving the implementation of high-speed [[serial bus|serial]] and [[parallel bus|parallel]] sub-buses for use as I/O interconnections and data mover subsystems. These architectures can be used as message switches, routers and small multiprocessor parallel architectures.

VITA's application for recognition as an accredited standards developer organization of ANSI was granted in June 1993. Numerous other documents ( including mezzanine, P2 and serial bus standards) have been placed with VITA as the Public Domain Administrator of these technologies.

{| class="wikitable"
|+ Evolution of VME
|-
! Topology
! Year
! Bus cycle
! Maximum speed (MB/s)
|-
| VMEbus32 Parallel Bus Rev. A
| 1981
| {{abbr|2=BLock Transfer|BLT}}
| 40
|-
| VMEbus IEEE-1014
| 1987
| {{abbr|2=BLock Transfer|BLT}}
| 40
|-
| [[VME64]]
| 1994
| {{abbr|2=Multiplexed BLock Transfer (data over address lines, too)|MBLT}}
| 80
|-
| [[VME64x]]
| 1997 
| [[2eVME]]
| 160
|-
| [[VME320]]
| 1997 
| [[2eSST]]
| 320
|}