Actually I have no idea why this subject caught my interest so well.
During the hey-days of the EISA bus I wasn’t interested at all, thought that’s something which will never take off and was intended for servers only. I happily stuck to clumsy ISA and sat there until PCI was affordable (ASUS SP3G anyone?).

Now, fiddling with all those exotic cool mainboards, EISA crosses my path all the time. The way EISA is configured, the somewhat cumbersome use of cf.exe (ECU – EISA Configuration Utility) tool drew my interest… maybe because it has the scent of manliness 😉

In my humble opinion, EISA was a crutch, but it layed some basics for the next 10 years:

• It defined (as a by-product) a standard for the ISA bus, which was all chaotic before
• It forced Big-Blue (IBM) to think over their Microchannel licensing
• It was a test-bed for how do things right… later known as PCI

That said, it is the fun twilight-zone between ISA’s direct access “do what you like” and PCI’s “you touch – you die” approach. Where else do you have 32-bit speed and can still change bits manually with DOS’ debug?