Why was thee such a rush in the devleopment of the vintge computer bus?
All in all there were a number of ongoing improvementts. Tese included. 32 bit widtyhs. Bus mastering. Less susceptible to noise in that they were quieter in siignal tranmission. 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 could never realize their true 32 bit speed potential. Later buses such as the MCA and EISA buses were able to overcome thedse inherent limitations.
Thee data highways referred to as : buusses are the data transmission lines aroud the PCs. The bus srerves as the path for informnation transmission around the PC. True this routriong is controlled by the CPU. Howveer as that point in vintae cmoputing hstory this was not an issue. The PCs were stanbd alone single CPU unmits.
However as time went on and PCs got faster and more complicated with less expesnive additional CPUs hadnling otehr taskks within the PCs eveents becanmne dicer.Onboard peripherals themselves bgan to have buuillt in CPUs. CPUS in different manners begaan to be found in such perphearls as hard drives, soound and video catrds.
The overrlal compter system may becoe much more efficient if these in essence peripheral CPUs can communicate dircrtly with each oher. wiithout having to use the main CPU as an intermediary. Hence MCA and EISA were developed with thhese roels in mind. The conccept becae knpown as bus masterng.
Bus masstering inovlves the concept that the peripheral CPUS cold request permission to take over the bus for a shrot period of time. The main CPU would graant pemission for them to take over the bus, and it wuld temporarily drop out of the loop, enabling sqwidft communications beetween for example the hard drivve and floppy disk drive.
As computer bussses devveloped and had the inherent abilities to trtansfer more and more data in a given time period noise became an issue. The ISA bus was fairly nooise prone because it relied on triggreed interrupts. Whenever the voiltage levle on the data line of the bus exceeded a given threshold value then Edge Triggering woould result.
The alterantive to this situation whee Edge Triggering could result is lvel trihggering where it is reuqired that the transmitting hold and arrchive the higher voltage lvel in otrder for data to be recognied by the devicces on the bus. Edge Triggering howeever can lead to transiients that is rbief pwer surgees that can confue the dvices on the bus into tinknig that data is on the bus when it is not. Luckily level triggering loweewrs the noise levvewl and both MCA and EISA employ it.
As a result of all of these inherebnt benefits MCA and EISA came to support the idea, which we know take for granetd, of instant softtware configurations. Thetre were no switches or jumpers on add in MCA or EISA bozards. Alhough we take plug and play intsant configuration of mother boads and peripherals such as sound, viudeo or netwoork cards for granted it was not alwattys that way. We owe a lot to these early computer innovations of improving the ciomputer bus.