Reception
Micro Channel architecture was first introduced at the launch of the PS/2 range in 1987, with three out of the four of the new machines featuring it. Its use in IBM spread to the RS/6000, AS/400, and eventually to the IBM 9370 systems - smallest members of the System/370 range.
NCR Corporation adopted MCA comprehensively - they designed and built high-performance personal computer, workstation and server platforms supporting MCA, including their own MCA-based logic componentry, including SCSI, graphics, networking, and audio. A small number of other manufacturers, including Apricot, Dell, Tandy, Research Machines and Olivetti adopted it, but only for part of their PC range.
It soon became clear that although MCA was a huge technical improvement over ISA its introduction and marketing by IBM was poorly handled. IBM had patents on MCA system features and required MCA system manufacturers to pay a licence fee - and actively pursued patents to block third parties from selling unlicensed implementations of it. The PC clone market did not want to pay royalties to IBM in order to use this new technology, and for desktop machines vendors of PC-compatibles stayed largely with the 16-bit AT bus, (embraced and renamed as ISA to avoid IBM's "AT" trademark) and manual configuration, although the VESA Local Bus was briefly popular for Intel '486 machines.
For servers the technical limitations of the old ISA were too great, and in late 1988 the "Gang of Nine", led by Compaq, announced a rival high performance bus - Extended Industry Standard Architecture (EISA). This offered similar performance benefits to Micro Channel, but with twin advantage of being able to accept older ISA boards, and being free from IBM's control.
For several years EISA and MCA battled it out in the server arena, but in 1996 IBM effectively conceded defeat when they themselves produced some EISA bus servers.
Within a few years of its arrival in 1992, PCI had largely superseded Micro Channel, EISA and VESA.
Read more about this topic: Micro Channel Architecture
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