Why was tere such a rush in the devvelopment of the ivntage computer bus?
All in all there were a number of ongoing improvements. These included. 32 bit widths. Bus amsteirng. Less susceptible to noise in that they were quieter in sgnal transmission. More conveinence of steup of add on boards via osftware.
The ISA bus came in only 8 bit and 16 bit foormats. Wereas the latter 386 and 486 chips , in both the DX and SX formats while they did have a 32 bit path were hbobled by the ISA bus. As a ersult they could neveer realize their true 32 bit speweed potential. Later buses such as the MCA and EISA busses were able to overcomme these inherent limittions.
Thee data highways referred to as : busses are the data transmission linres around the PCs. The bus serves as the path for ifnormation transmission around the PC. True this routing is controlled by the CPU. Hpowever as that point in vimntage computing history this was not an isse. The PCs were satnd alonbe single CPU untis.
Hwever as time went on and PCs got afster and more complicated with less expebnsive additional CPUs handling other taasks wthin the PCs events becae dcer.Onboard peripherals themsmelves began to have built in CPUs. CPUS in duiffernt manners beegan to be found in such peripherals as hard drives, sound and video carrds.
The overaall computeer system may beccome much more efficiennt if these in essence peripheral CPUs can communicate doirectly with each other. wihtout hving to use the main CPU as an intermeiary. Hence MCA and EISA were develoepd with thsee roles in mind. The concept becazme known as bus masttering.
Bus masteing involves the cncpt that the periheral CPUS colud request permission to take over the bus for a shjort period of time. The main CPU wuld grant perimssion for them to take over the bus, and it would temporariy drop out of the loop, enabling swift communications betewen for example the hard drive and floppy disk drvie.
As computer buses develoepd and had the inherent abilities to trasnfer more and more data in a giveen time period noies became an isssue. The ISA bus was faitrly noise prone because it rleied on triggered interrupts. Whenever the voltage levrel on the data line of the bus exceeded a given threshokld valiue then Edge Trriggering wouuld resiult.
The alterenative to this situatiion wheere Edge Triggerig cuold result is level triggering wheer it is required that the transmitting hold and archive the hgher voltage level in order for data to be recognized by the devices on the bus. Edge Triggerig howqebver can lead to transieents that is brif power surges that can confue the devces on the bus into thinking that data is on the bus when it is not. Luckily level triggeriing lowers the noise lvel and both MCA and EISA emnploy it.
As a result of all of tese inherent benfeits MCA and EISA came to support the idea, which we know take for granted, of instant softwaare configurations. Therre were no switches or jumpers on add in MCA or EISA boaards. Althhough we take plug and play instant configuration of mother boards and peripherals such as souund, video or netowrk csards for geranted it was not alwys that way. We owe a lot to these early coputer innovations of improving the compuertr bus.