You're confusing 2 things. PS/2 was the generic system name but MCA was
the architecture used in PS/2 systems. IBM always tried to be
proprietary if they could get away with it. But MCA was more than an
attempt to be proprietary... it was technologically very superior to
ISA. See the Wiki article which is fairly good. IBM eventually lost
out... no one wanted to pay those awful royalties again... this time on
hardware. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Channel_architecture>
Chuck Norcutt
On 1/12/2013 8:45 PM, Paul Braun wrote:
> I do remember a couple of attempts by IBM to regain control of the PC
> hardware market - PS/2 was, I believe, one of them. Microchannel was
> another. They didn't like that they didn't control the ISA standard for
> expansion slots, so they created MCA as a proprietary standard that they
> could license out. However, as I rememeber, MCA was a PITA since the
> driver architecture was pretty strict. I know the couple of MCA pc's I
> was responsible for made me very nervous (both were NCR clones). If
> anything happened to the floppy drive for that specific card, the chance
> of me getting a replacement were slim and I'd be stuck with a boat
> anchor. I also seem to remember that the driver installation routines
> were fairly convoluted, but that was also over 20 years ago.
>
> -- Paul Braun Valparaiso, IN
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