On 09/30/2017 04:12 PM, Tom Gardner via cctalk wrote: > I think Chuck has it backwards, AT Attachment as defined by the ANSI > committee publically predates IDE. Although IDE was used internally at WD > it did not surface publically until well after the ANSI committee adopted AT > Attachment, abbreviated ATA. The AT in AT Attachment or ATA has never stood > for "Advanced Technology" although many presume so.
"IDE" was a Western Digital term for drives used in the Compaq PC, dating from 1986. I've probably got documents from about that time talking about IDE, if I look. Because of Compaq's introduction of the thing early on, that's what we called it then. The "ATA Standard" began its work in 1988 by the Common Access Method committee of ANSI X3T10 and eventually came out with a standard in 1994, but that was long after "IDE" was the lingua franca term for these drives. The ANSI document: https://ecse.rpi.edu/courses/S15/ECSE-4780/Labs/IDE/IDE_SPEC.PDF In, you'll read: "The application environment for the AT Attachment Interface is any computer which uses an AT Bus or 40-pin ATA interface. The PC AT Bus is a widely used and implemented interface for which a variety of peripherals have been manufactured. As a means of reducing size and cost, a class of products has emerged which embed the controller functionality in the drive. These new products utilize the AT Bus fixed disk interface protocol, and a subset of the AT bus. Because of their compatibility with existing AT hardware and software this interface quickly became a de facto industry standard." So, even ANSI X3 talks about the PC AT bus. And yes, "AT", according to IBM, stands for "Advanced Technology" Pretty much, all you need to connect an ATA-1 drive to the 5170 bus is a couple of transceivers and an address decoder. --Chuck
