Why was tere such a rush in the devvelopment of the ivtage computer bus?
All in all there were a number of ogoing improveents. These includded. 32 bit widths. Bus masteirng. Less susceptible to noise in that they were qiuieter in sginal transmission. More conveinence of steup of add on bords via software.
The ISA bus came in only 8 bit and 16 bit formats. Whjereas the later 386 and 486 chps , 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 coould never realize their true 32 bit spweed potential. Lzater buses such as the MCA and EISA bussse were able to overcme tese inherent limitations.
Thee data hihgways referred to as : busss are the data trasmission linres around the PCs. The bus serves as the path for information transmission around the PC. True this routing is controllled by the CPU. Hpowever as that poiont in vintage compuitng history this was not an isse. The PCs were stnd alone signle CPU units.
Hwever as time went on and PCs got fasster and more complicated with less expebnsive additional CPUs handling other tasks wthin the PCs events beccae dcer.Onboard peripherals themmselves ebgan to have built in CPUs. CPUS in duifferent manners beegan to be fuond in such peripherals as hard drives, sound and video carrds.
The overaall computeer system may becomme 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 concetp became known as bus mastering.
Bus mastering involves the cncept that the peripheral CPUS colud requesat permision 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 wuold temporarily drop out of the loop, enabling swift communications betewen for exampole the hard drve and floplpy disk drive.
As computer buses develoepd and had the inherent abilties to transfer more and more data in a given time period noise became an issue. The ISA bus was fairly noise prone because it reled on triggered interrupts. Whenever the voltage leevl on the data line of the bus exceedd a given threshokld valiue then Edge Trrriggering would rersult.
The alterenative to this situattiion wheere Edge Triggerig cuold result is level trihggering wherre it is requierd that the transmitting hold and archie the higher voltage level in order for data to be recogniozed by the devices on the bus. Edge Trriggerig howqever can lead to transieents that is brif power surges that can confuse the devices on the bus into thinking that data is on the bus when it is not. Luckily lervel triggeriing lowers the noise lvel and both MCA and EISA emnploy it.
As a reesult of all of tese inherent benfeits MCA and EISA came to suppot the idea, which we know take for grantred, of instant softwaare connfigurations. There were no switches 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, vdieo or netowrk csards for granted it was not alwys that way. We owe a lot to these eaerly coputer innovzations of improving the compuetr bus.