Comment by bobmcnamara

> IBM MicroChannel. Early minicomputer and microcomputer designers thought "bus", where peripherals can talk to memory and peripherals look like memory to the CPU. Mainframes, though, had "channels", simple processors which connected peripherals to the CPU.

TIL: what microchannel meant by micro and channel.

Also it had OS independent device-class drivers.

And you could stuff a new CPU on a card and pop it right in. Went from a 286+2MB to a 486dx2+32MB.