| Short
for Micro Channel Architecture, MCA was introduced by IBM
in 1987. MCA,
or the Micro Channel bus, was a competition for ISA bus. The MCA bus offered several
additional features over the ISA such as a 32-bit
bus (although there was also a 16-bit
bus), ran at 10MHz, automatically configure cards
(similar to what Plug and Play is today), and
bus mastering for greater efficiency. 
Above is a graphic example of a MCA network card and what a MCA card may look like. One of the major downfalls of
the MCA bus was it being a proprietary
bus and because of competing bus designs. The MCA bus never became widely used
and has since been fazed out of the desktop computers.
Also see: Bus, EISA, ISA,
Motherboard
definitions
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