18 Apr
2013
18 Apr
'13
9:49 p.m.
On 18/04/2013 18:17, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 04/18/2013 01:14 PM, Cory Smelosky wrote:
> Yeah. Every time I think of IBM mainframe designs...I can't help but wonder
> why microchannel for the microcomputer market never took off.
I think it hast
at least something to do with the fact whilst the XT and
AT buses were licence free, IBM wanted to retain control of MCA and so
charged a license fee.
So for workstations there was still AT/ISA bus which was free, and for
most things you didn't need the speed of MCA.
Servers was a different ball games, but most of the other server makers
apart from NCR went with EISA to avoid IBMs control.
Then there was the cludge that was VESA for workstations that needed
more speed....
Lastly PCI in its various variants....
I'm not sure it's fair to say that it never
took off. It was very popular
for a long time. Many manufacturers made MCA cards. It was also big in the
RS/6000 world.
However...that has nothing at all to do with mainframes. Some of the
"baby" development system "mainframes" like the P/390 do use
MCA...there's an
MCA version of the P/390 card. (that was the first one, the next two were PCI)
MCA was really a microcomputers-only bus.
I wonder how they handled the
extended keyboard buttons. Did they include a
keyboard? ;)e Yes, there was a special keyboard.
-Dave
> That interface board allows one to connect a
PeeCee (or a Mac, or whatever
> it's for) to one of those establishment controllers.
I want to know more about these boards now, did software come with them?
Like
other application-specific boards, they usually came with a driver
disk and likely a 3270-ish terminal program.