What Is Extended Industry Standard Architecture (EISA)?

Extended Industry Standard Architecture (EISA) is a bus structure extending the Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) from sixteen to 32 bits. EISA was offered in 1988 via way of means of the Gang of Nine - a collection of PC producers. EISA was designed to be an open fashionable permitting producers to create computer systems primarily based totally on not unusual place hardware and software. The Gang of Nine agreed to license their hardware designs and associated patents to other companies wishing to manufacture compatible products. The first EISA card made it into production in 1989, but the standard took off around 1994 when IBM began using it extensively in their PS/2 servers. With the advent of the Intel 80286 and its new bus-sharing capabilities, it was only a matter of time before manufacturers began to develop their solutions. IBM's Micro Channel Architecture (MCA) was designed to compete with EISA, and MCA became a patented sixteen and 32-bit parallel pc bus for IBM's PS/2 computers. EISA prolonged the superior technology (AT) bus structure and facilitated bus sharing among more than one valuable processing unit (CPU). EISA is likewise called Extended ISA. The EISA bus is compatible with old ISA buses. It's like a 16-bit slot, but it's got two of them! If you're wondering how that works, it's like this: You've reached your regular 16-bit slot, and then you've got a 32-bit slot that's the same size as one of your regular slots. So when you look at your computer from the outside, it seems like a computer with an average amount of slots for your cards. But inside each of those slots is another slot—a 32-bit slot that's the same size as one of those 16-bit slots. It's like an optical illusion where something seems more extensive because it has many more minor things around it that make it seem smaller than it is (but not quite). So basically, this means that EISA busses are compatible with older ISA busses because they're just bigger versions!