Instrumentation buses for high energy physics, past, present and future

High-energy physics experiments have become progressively larger and more complex. It is pointed out that the landmark development which enabled the ever-growing quantities of detector data to be extracted was the instrumentation bus. It is emphasized that, while bus specifications continually improve, the essential qualities of the original concept have proved invaluable, allowing inestimable economies of scale as well as the melding of devices from different institutional and commercial cultures into integrated structures. Particular attention is given to CAMAC, FASTBUS, NIM, and VME instrumentation standards