futurebus looked to fix these problems and create a successor to systems like vmebus with a system that could grow in speed without affecting existing devices. in order to do this the primary technology of futurebus was built using asynchronous links, allowing the devices plugged into it to talk at whatever speed they wished. another problem that needed to be addressed was the ability to have several cards in the system as "masters", allowing futurebus to build multiprocessor machines. this required some form of "distributed arbitration" to allow the various cards to gain access to the bus at any point, as opposed to vme, which put a single master in slot 0 with overall control. in order to have a clear performance benefit, futurebus was designed to have the performance needed ten years in the future.