Winn L. Rosch Hardware Bible, Sixth Edition

AT Attachment

The dominant hard disk interface for the computer has become the AT Attachment design—a natural outcome considering that the interface is based on the ISA expansion bus, at one time the most widely used computer bus. Despite its wide application, you still might never have heard of the AT Attachment name. It goes under more aliases than a candidate for the Ten Most Wanted list. The most familiar of its alternate monikers is IDE, which stands for Integrated Drive Electronics and is a term that correctly describes a technology rather than a specific interface. Nevertheless, the name IDE gets used indiscriminately by people in the computer industry for the AT Attachment design. Sometimes engineers call ATA the AT interface, which strictly ...