The Sneaky Standard: How Intel Undercut a Standards Body to Give Us the PCI Connector
owl writes:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/intel-pci-history
Personal computing has changed a lot in the past four decades, and one of the biggest changes, perhaps the most unheralded, comes down to compatibility. These days, you generally can't fry a computer by plugging in a joystick that the computer doesn't support. Simply put, standardization slowly fixed this. One of the best examples of a bedrock standard is the peripheral component interconnect, or PCI, which came about in the early 1990s and appeared in some of the decade's earliest consumer machines three decades ago this year. To this day, PCI slots are used to connect network cards, sound cards, disc controllers, and other peripherals to computer motherboards via a bus that carries data and control signals. PCI's lessons gradually shaped other standards, like USB, and ultimately made computers less frustrating. So how did we get it? Through a moment of canny deception.
[...] So how did we end up with the standards that we have today, and the PCI expansion card standard specifically? PCI wasn't the only game in town-you could argue, for example, that if things played out differently, we'd all be using NuBus or Micro Channel architecture. But it was a standard seemingly for the long haul, far beyond other competing standards of its era.
Who's responsible for spearheading this standard? Intel. While PCI was a cross-platform technology, it proved to be an important strategy for the chipmaker to consolidate its power over the PC market at a time when IBM had taken its foot off the gas, choosing to focus on its own PowerPC architecture and narrower plays like the ThinkPad instead, and was no longer shaping the architecture of the PC.
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