Inventor VIA, which launched its mainboard business with Mini-ITX devices back in 2001, has released an ebook that offers some background of the technology as well as a history of memorable Mini-ITX computers.
VIA first showed a Mini-ITX board design in March of 2001, sold first samples in April and the VT6010 Mini-ITX reference design in November. The first commercially available board was the Epia-8000, which was released in April 2002 and was built for VIA's C3 800 MHz processor with Eden core.
Mini-ITX 2.0 was announced in 2008 and the first board to support the Nano CPU, the VB8001, was sold in October 2008. More recently, dual-core Nano support was added with the Epia-M900 in July of this year. Most Mini-ITX boards are sold into the industrial and embedded applications markets today.
VIA believes that the biggest opportunity for Mini-ITX in the future will be in developing countries and geographies, including China, India, the Middle East, and Latin America. As cloud computing gains traction and small form factor thin clients become more attractive, VIA also hopes that it can place Mini-ITX as a "standard platform for powering such devices."