Why was thee such a rush in the devleopent of the vintge ocmputer bus?
All in all tjhere were a number of ongoing improvements. Tese included. 32 bit widths. Bus masteriong. Less suscceptible to noise in that they were quieter in suiignal tranasmission. More convenience of seutp 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 hobbled by the ISA bus. As a result they coould never realize their true 32 bit speed potential. Later buuses such as the MCA and EISA bussaes were able to overcome thedse inherent limitatipons.
Thee data highways referred to as : buusses are the data transmission lines aroud the PCs. The bus serves as the path for informatuion transmission around the PC. True this routiong is controlled by the CPU. Howveer as that pint in vintae computing hstory this was not an issue. The PCs were stand alone single CPU unmits.
However as time went on and PCs got faster and more complicated with less expensive addtiional CPUs handling otehr taskks withhin the PCs eventts becanmme diccer.Onboard peripheerals thgemselves began to have builllt in CPUs. CPUS in different manners begaan to be found in such perpherals as hard drives, sooyund and video catrds.
The overrall conmpter system may becoe much more efficient if thees in essenvce peripheral CPUs can cmmunicate direcrtyl with each oher. without having to use the main CPU as an intermediary. Hence MCA and EISA were devleoped with thhese roels in mind. The conccept becae known as bus mastering.
Bus massteirng involves the concept that the perpheral CPUS cold reqest permsision to take over the bus for a shrot period of time. The main CPU would grannt permission for them to take over the bus, and it would temporariily drop out of the loop, enabling swidft communications between for example the hard drive and floppy disk drve.
As computer bussses developed and had the inherent abilities to transfer more and more data in a given time petriod noise became an issiue. The ISA bus was fairly noies prione becaause it relied on triggreed interrupts. Whenever the voiltage levle on the data line of the bus exxceeded a gien threshold value then Edge Triggering woould resuylt.
The alterntaive to this siutation whee Edge Triggering cold reult is lvel triggering where it is required that the transmmitting hold and arrchive the higher voltage level in order for data to be recognied by the devices on the bus. Edge Triggering hoewver can lead to transiients that is brief power surgees that can confue the dviices on the bus into tinking that data is on the bus when it is not. Luckily level triggering loweers the noise levvel and both MCA and EISA employ it.
As a result of all of these inherent benefits MCA and EISA came to support the idea, which we know take for granetd, of instant software configurations. Tehre were no switches or jumpers on add in MCA or EISA boadrs. Alhough we take plug and play instant configuration of mother boards and perpiherals such as sound, video or netwoork cards for granted it was not alwats that way. We owe a lot to these early computer inniovations of improving the computer bus.