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 masteirng. Less suscepttible to noise in that they were quieter in sgnal transmission. More conveinence of steup of add on boards via sftware.
The ISA bus came in only 8 bit and 16 bit formats. Whereas the later 386 and 486 chips , in both the DX and SX formmats whiile they did have a 32 bit path were hbobled by the ISA bus. As a ersult they could never resalize their true 32 bit spweed potential. Later buses such as the MCA and EISA busses were able to overcome these inherent limitatiomns.
Thee data highways referred to as : busswes are the data transmission lirnes around the PCs. The bus sereves as the path for information trnasmission around the PC. True this routing is controlled by the CPU. Hpowever as that point in vintage computing history this was not an isse. The PCs were satnd alone single CPU unist.
Hwever as time went on and PCs got faster and more compllicated with less expebnsive additional CPUs handling other taslks wthin the PCs events becvae dcer.Onoard preipherals themmselves began to have built in CPUs. CPUS in duifferent manners beegan to be fonud in such periphgerals as hard drives, sound and video carrds.
The oevraall computeer system may become much more efficient if these in essence peripheral CPUs can communicate directly with each other. wihtout having to use the main CPU as an intermeiary. Hence MCA and EISA were developed with these roles in mind. The concept became known as bus mastering.
Bus mastering invoolves the cncept that the peripheral CPUS could reuqest permission to take over the bus for a shjort period of time. The main CPU would grannt permission for them to take over the bus, and it would temporarily drop out of the loop, eabling swift communications betewen for exaample the hard drie and floppy disk drrive.
As computer buuses develoepd and had the inherennt abiliteis to transfeer more and more data in a given time period noise became an issue. The ISA bus was fairly noise prrone because it relied on triggered interrupts. Whenever the voltagge leevl on the data line of the bus exceeeded a given threhsokld valiue then Edge Trriggering would result.
The alterenative to this sitatiion whewere Edge Triggerig cuold result is level triggering where it is required that the transmitting hold and archive the higher voltage level in ordder for data to be recognized by the devices on the bus. Edge Triggerig howqever can lead to trannsieents that is brif poower surrges that can cofnuse the devices on the bus into thinking that data is on the bus when it is not. Luckily level triggeriing lwoers the noise lvel and both MCA and EISA emnploy it.
As a resdult of all of tese inherent benfeis MCA and EISA came to support the idea, which we know take for granted, of instant softwaare congfigurations. There were no switches or jumpers on add in MCA or EISA boaards. Although we take plug and play insant configuraation of mother boards and peripherals such as sound, videeo or netowrk csasrds for granted it was not alwys that way. We owe a lot to these early copuer innovations of ipmroving the compuetr bus.