Mac Lane and Eilenberg's motivations for category theory

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I'm looking to understand the conceptual process that brought Eilenberg and Mac Lane in developing the basic concepts of category theory.

I quote Mac Lane's book "Category theory for working mathematicians":

"...An adequate treatment of the natural isomorphisms occurring for such limits was a major motivation of the first Eilenberg-Mac Lane paper on category theory [The general theory of natural equivalence]..."

Here's my question:

What are these natural isomorphisms that Mac Lane were referring to?