17 May
2013
17 May
'13
9:41 p.m.
On 05/17/2013 08:48 PM, Dave McGuire wrote:
I agree. At the time it was simply a shortsighted
decision, as were nearly
all decisions that brought the PC into existence.
From a software point of view, ATA made sense. It succeeded ESDI,
which, in turn succeeded the ST-412 interface. In fact, from a software
viewpoint, it's difficult to distinguish a PC ESDI drive from a 16-bit
ATA drive. So, there was a software protocol that was somewhat smarter
than ST-412 already around, so it made sense to move that to ATA/IDE.
ESDI drives were about as fast as SCSI drives of the time--and about as
expensive.
Not that I loved ATA/IDE--early drives could be very fussy about what
other vendor's drives they shared the bus with.
--Chuck