In time, many Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) cards incorporated, through proprietary and varied techniques, hardware to self-configure or to provide for software configuration; often, the card came with a configuration program on disk that could automatically set the software-configurable (but not itself self-configuring) hardware.
ISA PnP or (legacy) Plug & Play ISA was a plug-n-play system that used a combination of modifications to hardware, the system BIOS, and operating system software to automatically manage resource allocations.