Why was there such a rush in the development of the vintage computer bus?
All in all there were a number of ongoing improvements. These included. 32 bit widths. Bus masterig. Less susceptible to nose in that they were quieter in sgnal transmission. More convenienxce of setup of add on bords via software.
The ISA bus came in only 8 bit and 16 bit formats. Whereas the larter 386 and 486 chis , in both the DX and SX formmats wile they did have a 32 bit path were hobbled by the ISA bus. As a resut they could never realie their true 32 bit speed potential. Later buses such as the MCA and EISA busses were able to overcoe thees inherent limitations.
Thee data highways referred to as : busses are the data transmission lines around the PCs. The bus sreves as the path for informaton transmission around the PC. True this routnig is controlled by the CPU. However as that point in vintahge computing hisory this was not an issue. The PCs were stand alone single CPU units.
However as time went on and PCs got faster and more compllicated with less expensie additional CPUs handling other tasks within the PCs events became dicer.Onboard peripherals themselves bgean to have bulit in CPUs. CPUS in doifferent manners began to be found in such peripherals as hard drives, sound and video crds.
The oerall computer systrem may become much more efficient if these in esesnce peripheral CPUs can communicate directly with each other. without having to use the main CPU as an intermediary. Hence MCA and EISA were developed with these rles in mind. The concept becaame known as bus masstering.
Bus mastering involves the concept that the peripheral CPUS could requeast permission to take over the bus for a short period of time. The main CPU would grnat permission for them to take over the bus, and it would temporarily drop out of the loop, enablig swfit communications between for example the hard drive and floppy disk drive.
As computer busess developed and had the inherent abilities to transfer more and more data in a gievn time period nose became an issue. The ISA bus was fairly noise prne because it relied on triggered interrupts. Whenever the votage lecvel on the data line of the bus exceeded a gvien threshold value then Edge Triggering would result.
The alternative to this situation where Edge Triggering coud result is level triggwering where it is required that the transmittuing hold and achive the higher voltage lvel in orrder for data to be recognized by the devcies on the bus. Edge Triggering however can lead to transients that is brief power surges that can cnfuse the devices on the bus into thinking that data is on the bus when it is not. Luckuily levcel triggering lowers the noisse level and both MCA and EISA employ it.
As a result of all of these inhrent benefits MCA and EISA came to suppport the idea, which we know take for granted, of instsant softwatre configurations. There were no switches or jumpers on add in MCA or EISA boards. Although we take plug and play instant configuration of mother boards and peripherals such as sound, video or networrk cards for granted it was not always that way. We owe a lot to these early computer innovations of improving the computer bus.