VMEbus was originally developed by Motorola in 1981 for a set of Motorola 68000 CPUs. It was used in the IBM System 9000 Instrument Controllers, Automatix robots and machine vision systems.

VMEbus works on a Eurocard model, where a European format governs the design of printed circuit boards. It has been designated ANSI/IEEE 1014-1987 by the IEC. As an OEM bus, it competes with other models like the CompactPCI, based on overall hardware design and trends within the PCB/electronics industry. VMEBus is built in a variety of sizes to fit into a particular rack space and has its own command and signal syntax to indicate various states of operation.