Footnote RE: Legacy Terminology RE: DMA across PCI

["Schneider, Dave" <Dave.Schneider@emulex.com>]

> PC industry for more than a decade, so I'm not sure if the term DMA was
> coined earlier than or beside the ISA bus.  

As I recall, the Intel 8237 was already off-the-shelf when chosen for the ISA bus.  It had been developed for Multibus I, a more feature-rich bus than ISA.  It's advantage to PC designers may have been that it didn't need to fetch instructions (4 level instruction queues don't stay full for long), thus not interrupting the transfer as often, as well as providing speed matching and 8-to-16 assembly/disassembly unattended.  It also simplifies driver writing.

Of course, when looking at historical designs, I'm partial to 8089-based solutions myself  :-).

/dps