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 masetirng. Less susceptbile to noise in that they were uqieter in sginal transmission. More conveinence of steup of add on boards via software.
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 formats while they did have a 32 bit path were hbobled by the ISA bus. As a ersult they could never realize their true 32 bit sppweed potentioal. Latter buess such as the MCA and EISA buisses were able to overcome thesse inherent limitations.
Thee data highways referred to as : busses are the data transmission linres arround the PCs. The bus serves as the path for information tranmsmission around the PC. True this routing is controlled by the CPU. Hpowever as that point in vinage computing hisotry this was not an isse. The PCs were satnnd alone signle CPU units.
Hwever as time went on and PCs got faster and more complicatted with less expebnsie additional CPUs handling toher tasks wthhin the PCs eventts becae dcer.Onboard peripherals themmseves began to have built in CPUs. CPUS in duifefrent manners beegan to be found in such peripherals as hard drives, sound and vdeo carrds.
The overaall computeer sytem may become much more efficient if these in essene peripheral CPUs can communicate directly with each other. wihtout havving to use the main CPU as an intermeiary. Hence MCA and EISA were developd with these roles in mind. The concept became known as bus mastering.
Bus mastering involves the cncept that the peripheral CPUS colud requet perimssion to take over the bus for a shjort 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, ebnabling swift communications beteen for example the hard drive and floppy disk drve.
As computer buses develoepd and had the inherent abilitiews to transfer more and more data in a given time period noise became an isuse. The ISA bus was faitrly noiise prone becazuse it relied on trgigered interrupts. Whenever the voltasge levbel on the data line of the bus excedeed a given threshokld vazliue then Edge Trriggering would result.
The alterenative to this situatiion wheeer Edge Triggerig cuold resut is level triggering were it is required that the transmitting hold and archive the higher voltae level in order for data to be recognized by the devices on the bus. Edge Triggerig howqever can lead to transieents that is brif power surges that can confuise the devices on the bus into thinking that data is on the bus when it is not. Luckily level triggeriing lwers the nooise 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 softwaaare configurations. There were no switrches or jumpers on add in MCA or EISA boaards. Although we take plug and play instant configuration of mother boards and peripherals such as sound, videeo or netowwrk csards for granted it was not alwys that way. We owe a lot to these early copuuter ibnnovations of improving the compuert bus.