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To: damniseedemons who wrote (20868)	9/8/1998 11:50:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

Jeez, Sal, haven't we been through this before? IBM's attempt to reestablish the proprietary lock after the chicken had flown the coop. Patent-protected, license required interface bus, sort of like Intel socket8/slot1. Came out with PS/2, circa '86 or so. At least Microchannel was on time, as opposed to Bill's collaborative work on OS/2. Technically better than the so-called isa bus, but it didn't do IBM much good. Cheers, Dan.

To: damniseedemons who wrote (20868)	9/9/1998 1:37:00 PM
From: Charles Hughes	Respond to of 24154

Microchannel: In brief, IBM wanted to come up with something proprietary and technically less limiting than ISA in a bus, like PCI or VL-bus, but earlier. This was called Microchannel. It was to be fast, wide, and reliable. It had several problems: 1. Pricing. IBM wanted huge royalties for it, on the order of 5% I think, and thought their monopoly power in the PC space would let them force that through. It didn't work. 2. VL-bus. A consortium of other manufacturers got together to make their own bus design, independently of IBM. This bus worked, and established a new architecture IBM had little to do with. 3. PCI. Intel, not wanting the independent manufacturers to take over the architecture initiative, and wanting a bit more monopoly of their own, and also genuinely wanting, like IBM, to fix a serious negative gating factor to further progress in the PC architecture, came up with the PCI bus. Works great, not as expensive. Wiped out the consortium effort, stranding 100's of millions of VL-bus cards worth tens of billions of dollars, like the ones in my junk drawers. This is OK with me, because PCI is so vastly better. 4. Reliability and standards. IBM was not able to make the Microchannel bus function within their own electrical and timing parameters. Cards from one system would not always run in another. This may have eventually been fixed, but way late. This was the worst element of the defeat for them. Lesson: If you want a huge paycheck for a new tech standard, at least make sure it is superior technology, and properly executed. Otherwise just having the current monopoly won't necessarily work. Lesson: Even if the current political regime (Reagan-Bush) has freed you to do what you want as a monopoly, try to be careful how you use that power. Or voila! Egg on the face. Lesson: Don't get greedy too early or too often. Cheers, Chaz P.S. There are hardware engineers here who probably know a great deal more about it.