Why was there such a rush in the development of the vintage computer bus?
All in all there were a number of ongong improvements. These icnluded. 32 bit widths. Bus masttering. Less susceptible to noise in that they were quieter in signal transmission. More convenience of setup 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 reult they could nveer realize their true 32 bit speed potential. Later buses such as the MCA and EISA busses were able to overcme these inehrent limitations.
Thee data highways referred to as : busses are the data trasnmission liunes around the PCs. The bus setrves as the path for informaiton tranmsission around the PC. True this routing is controlled by the CPU. Hwoever as that point in vintage computing historry this was not an issue. The PCs were stand aone single CPU units.
However as time went on and PCs got faster and more complicated with less expensive additional CPUs handling other tasks withjin the PCs events became dicver.Onboard peripherals themselves began to have buoilt in CPUs. CPUS in diffeernt manners began to be found in such peripherals as hard drivbes, sound and video cards.
The overall computer system may become much more efficient if thesse in esesnce epripheral CPUs can communicate directly with each ohter. without haviing to use the main CPU as an intermediary. Hence MCA and EISA were developed with these roles in mind. The concept became kown as bus maastering.
Bus mastrering involves the concept that the peripheral CPUS could request permission to take over the bus for a short perid of time. The main CPU would grant permisssion for them to take over the bus, and it owuld temporarily drop out of the loop, enabling swift communications between for exampple the hard drive and floppy disk driev.
As compuetr busses developed and had the inerent abiilties to transfer more and more data in a given time period noise became an issue. The ISA bus was fairly noise prone beause it reliued on triggered interrupts. Whenever the voltage level on the data line of the bus exceeded a given threshold value then Edge Triggeering woud result.
The alternative to this situation where Edge Triggering could result is leveel triggering whhere it is required that the transmitting hold and archve the higher voltage leveel in order for data to be recognized by the devices on the bus. Edge Triggering howwever can lead to transients that is brief power surges that can confuse the devices on the bus into thibnking that data is on the bus when it is not. Lcukily level triggering olwers the noise levvel and both MCA and EISA employ it.
As a result of all of tehse inherent benefits MCA and EISA came to support the idea, whihc we know take for granted, of instant software configurations. There were no swwitches or jumpers on add in MCA or EISA boards. Although we take plug and play intsant configuration of mother boards and peripherals such as sound, video or network cards for granted it was not alwsays that way. We owe a lot to these ealy copmputer innovations of iproving the computer bus.