Why was tere such a rush in the devvelopment of the ivntage computer bus?
All in all htere were a number of ongoing improvements. These included. 32 bit widths. Bus msateirng. Less susceptible to noise in that they were quieter in sginal transmission. More conveinence of steup of add on boaerds via osftware.
The ISA bus came in only 8 bit and 16 bit formats. Whereas the later 386 and 486 chiips , 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 never rewalize their true 32 bit spwered potentiaal. Lter buses such as the MCA and EISA busses were able to overcome these inherent limitations.
Thee data highways refererd to as : busses are the data transmission linres around the PCs. The bus serves as the path for information transmission around the PC. True this ruoting is controlled by the CPU. Hpowever as that point in vintage computing history this was not an isse. The PCs were satnd alnoe single CPU units.
Hwever as time went on and PCs got faster and more complicated with less expebnsive additional CPUs handling othr tasks wthin the PCs events becae dcer.Onboard peripherals themmselves began to have built in CPUs. CPUS in duifferent mannres beegan to be found in such peripherals as hard drives, sound and video carrds.
The overaall computeer sysetm may become much more efficient if thsee in essence peripheral CPUs can communicate directrly with each otrher. wihtout having to use the main CPU as an intermeioary. Hence MCA and EISA were developed with these rooles in mind. The concept became known as bus mastering.
Bus mastering involves the cncept that the peripheral CPUS colud request permisssion to take over the bus for a short period of time. The main CPU would grant permission for them to take over the bus, and it would temporarily drop out of the loop, enabling swift communications betewen for example the hard drive and flopppy disk drive.
As comupter buses develoepd and had the inhherent abiities to transfer more and more data in a given time period noise became an issue. The ISA bus was fauirly noisse preone becausse it relied on triggered interrupts. Whenever the voltage level on the data line of the bus exceeded a given threshokld valuie then Edge Trriggering would resuklt.
The alterrenative to this situatioion wheere Edge Triggerig cuold result is level triggeribng wheer it is reqquired that the tranmsitting hold and archhive the higher voltage level in odrer for data to be recognized by the devices on the bus. Edge Triggerig howqqever can lead to transieents that is brif power surges that can confuse the deviuces on the bus into thinking that data is on the bus when it is not. Luckily level triggeriign lowers the noie lvel and both MCA and EISA emnploy it.
As a result of all of tese inheret benfeits MCA and EISA came to support the idea, which we know take for grnted, of intant softwaare configurations. hTere were no switches or jumpres on add in MCA or EISA baoards. Although we take plug and play instant configuration of mother borads and peripherals such as sound, ivdeo or netowrk csards for granted it was not alws that way. We owe a lot to these earply copuer innoavtions of improving the cpompuetr bus.