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IBM’s Micro Channel Architecture.

Actually, MCA was a pretty good design, but what killed it was primarily IBM's ridiculous licensing fees, which really limited the availability of 3rd party adapters, though the incompatibility with legacy, ISA adapters didn't help. In fact, 1 of the 2 companies that actually licensed and sold computers equipped with the MCA bus produced a "dual bus" server, featuring both ISA and MCA busses (I believe this was before EISA).

For bonus points, what were those 2 companies that actually produced and sold MCA computers, besides IBM?

Mark

I know Tandy was one of them. I can't remember who the other one was, but it seems like it was somone you'd normally associate with telecom equipement.

I remember IBM originally saying that would not license MCA to any other vendor, but that had the unintended consequence of locking them out of government contracts that stipulated no "sole source" vendors.

I remember the "gang of nine" and EISA came in answer to MCA, but not long after that PCI made it all moot.