EISA

Robot_Maker · Post by **Robot_Maker** » Fri Sep 24, 2004 2:24 pm

If anyone's interested, I picked up an SGI Indigo2 workstation a few months back, and that has EISA slots fitted, though they seem pretty much worthless. It already has a high-quality sound system and LAN ports built into the motherboard and most of the slots are also blocked by the multi-tiered graphics unit anyway, whose proprietary slots share the same space. Perhaps it was to add a bog-standard ISA VGA card for having a seperate text-only console monitor next to the enormous graphics monitor, that's just about the only use I can think of for them.

Anonymous Coward · Post by **Anonymous Coward** » Sat Oct 30, 2004 3:55 pm

A 32 bit bus certainly was needed in the early 90s, and EISA didn't fail for that reason. The two main reasons were that EISA components were price and performace. damn expensive, and weren't really all that much faster than ISA unless you were using SCSI or NIC adapters. However, SCSI has never been popular in the consumer market, and network adapters didn't come into common use in the home until the late 90s. The big problem with EISA was that while it could support transfer rates of up to 32MB/sec, it still clunked along at 8MHz like the old ISA bus.

I think you guys are forgetting about the most popular 32-bit bus of them all for the 486. The VESA Local Bus. These slots ran at 33MHz (hence the term local "bus"). While it wasn't as reliable as EISA is was certainly much faster for the one thing people needed it for: Video performance. Despite what you might hear, VLB was very popular during the 486 days. Not all 486s had it...but all the GOOD ones did.

Unknown_K · Post by **Unknown_K** » Sat Oct 30, 2004 9:27 pm

Anonymous Coward wrote:A 32 bit bus certainly was needed in the early 90s, and EISA didn't fail for that reason. The two main reasons were that EISA components were price and performace. damn expensive, and weren't really all that much faster than ISA unless you were using SCSI or NIC adapters. However, SCSI has never been popular in the consumer market, and network adapters didn't come into common use in the home until the late 90s. The big problem with EISA was that while it could support transfer rates of up to 32MB/sec, it still clunked along at 8MHz like the old ISA bus.

I think you guys are forgetting about the most popular 32-bit bus of them all for the 486. The VESA Local Bus. These slots ran at 33MHz (hence the term local "bus"). While it wasn't as reliable as EISA is was certainly much faster for the one thing people needed it for: Video performance. Despite what you might hear, VLB was very popular during the 486 days. Not all 486s had it...but all the GOOD ones did.

Later generation 486 boards were PCI, just as usefull as VLB. While video was the number one reason 486 motherboards went to VLB, caching IDE controllers were also very popular.