Talk:Micro Channel architecture

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Back in the day (circa 1990), the word was that MCA had failed because only (numbers approximate) 50,000 distinct indentification codes were available for available for third party cards, and IBM had reserved half of them for their own use, and promised to disperse the others to anyone who asked for one. But it was this threatened layer of administration that sank the standard: hardware builders didn;t want to trust IBM. Am I remembering it wrong? If anyone says so, I'll shut up about it. --Crid 03:42, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Micro Channel vs MicroChannel?

Wasn't it officially written as "MicroChannel Architecture" (ie. without a space between Micro and Channel) or is my memory failing me? Letdorf 15:13, 22 June 2006 (UTC).

I believe the IBM way is to leave the words separate, and IBM rarely if ever used MCA as an acronym. I was once told from an informal IBM source that one reason for this was to avoid a trademark conflict with Music_Corporation_of_America. --Warphammer 07:58, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Streaming Mode

Does the section on Micro Channel bandwidth take into account the 'streaming' mode that could be used in later PS/2 and RS/6000 servers? This mode, as I recall, took a start address and an initial 32-bit data segment, and then took over the address bus for additional data to be written in sequence as if the Micro Channel were a 64-bit data bus at 10MHz for block transfers. IBM gave this as an 80MB/sec mode, but it is possible that overhead and other limitations led to the 66MB/sec figure here? --Warphammer 07:58, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] EISA Speed

The article reads "As a reaction to this, in late 1988 the "Gang of Nine", led by Compaq, announced a rival bus - EISA. Offering similar performance benefits, it had the advantage of being able to accept older XT and ISA boards"

But EISA never reached beyond about 60% of the speed that MCA had. EISA was marketed better and did offer better performance than ISA. It wasn't until VESA Local Bus that MCA was surpassed in speed.