Compaq Deskpro 386s20/n

Compaq had the QVision done, and then ATI had an EISA card for a while, but EISA
graphics were very quickly supplanted by first VL-bus then PCI. Few of the
graphics companies at the time wanted to deal with the added complexity of EISA
compared to ISA.

Yeah, the Adaptec 1740 is pretty good. I ran an EISA SCSI 486 system with a
Micronics motherboard as my main system for a while.

The 3c579 is 10mbit only, no 100mbit capability. About a year ago, my Compaq
EISA cards (convertible between Token Ring and Ethernet with a daughter card)
made their journey to the electronic board scrapper. Compaq made the TR card
and maybe one of the other companies specializing in TR did also. Like Proteon
and Madge. IBM did not.

EISA did outlive MicroChannel, which effectively bit the dust after 486s running
at 50 and 66MHz. I don't think there ever was a Pentium with MicroChannel, was
there? I don't think IBM ever did even a 100MHz 486 MCA system. EISA found
its way onto Pentium Pro and Pentium II server class boxes, and DEC Alpha
systems.

I have the old PC Magazine issue with the Bus Wars article here somewhere. I
saved many of the magazines with my articles in them. I also recall a trip
with PC Mag down to Boca, where I raised the hackles of the MicroChannel people
by telling them that the caching SCSI adapter controlled by an 80186 was
terribly mismatched with a 386, and that the adapter looked like it was designed
by accountants who found a lot of leftover 80186s and 30-pin SIMMs in a
warehouse somewhere.

Microchannel suffered from a lot of defects, but, along with EISA, paved the way
for the notion of embedding self-identification PALs in a device, so software
could easily tell what it was talking to. VL bus did not do this, and the
Intel PC guys picked right up on the idea when I suggested it to them. After
that, Plug and Play could become a reality. Of course, self-identification of
devices was not a new idea. It simply came from the mainframe world where some
of us worked in LARGE air-conditioned rooms with raised flooring.

To give perspective, PC Magazine back then ran maybe 500 or 600 pages every two
weeks, advertising computer boxes that cost thousands of dollars and monitors
costing up to a grand. Today, PC Magazine is a skinny publication, made so by
the internet ads and the lower prices of computers, incapable of sustaining the
expensive ad cost structure... Ben Myers

On Mon, 05 Mar 2007 04:49:56 GMT, "William R. Walsh"
m wrote:

Hi!

EISA adapters for what? EISA graphics cards were not even close to
being what they were cracked up to be.

Compaq's QVision seems to be pretty darn respectable. I've run one of these
in a 486DX2/66 EISA box and it was more than fast enough at the time. It
also had a VRAM upgrade fitted, so it could manage high color at up to
1024x768 resolution. This 386DX/33 box has the same adapter, and the VRAM
upgrade is present on it as well.

EISA SCSI adapters were pretty respectable.

I found a seemingly new in box Adaptec AHA-1740 adapter with all the docs
and diskettes. Another preservation effort...image the disks and scan the
docs...

EISA network cards offered no advantage over ISA ones.

Really? Oh well, the price was right right for the three 3C579-TPs I got
ahold of.

I do not think that there ever was an EISA 10/100 card, but 3COM produced
its
3C515 10/100 ISA NIC.

Hmmm...I don't know. Guess I'd be surprised if there wasn't, as EISA did
hold on for a lot longer in the x86 world than MCA. I've heard of Pentium II
machines that had EISA slots. I'd really like to find a real EISA Token Ring
card.

Wow, this takes me way back to the EISA versus MicroChannel article
I worked on for PC Magazine. The 386/33 was a much nicer box in
its time than IBM's ridiculously proprietary MicroChannel machines...

Funny you'd mention that (got a copy of the article? I'd love to read
it...wctatsignwalshcomptechdotcom) as I have quite the Microchannel
collection:

http://greyghost.dyndns.org/mcastuff/
http://www.walshcomptech.com/comp_coll.htm

I guess you could say that I think microchannel was "insufficiently
appreciated" in its day, although I can very easily see why that was. But
they are rock solid reliable boxen... Oh, by the way, there does exist a
100Mbit Ethernet card for MCA-bus systems. Too bad it's a loosely converted
ISA design and a joke from a reliability perspective...

William