Category Archives: Standards

The Secret History of ATAPI

The other day I asked myself a seemingly trivial question: What was the first ATAPI CD-ROM drive and when was it available? Given that ATAPI was a major technology which instantly obsoleted all proprietary CD-ROM interfaces and made SCSI much … Continue reading

Posted in CD-ROM, PC history, Standards, Undocumented | 59 Comments

Deeper Into ATA History

While looking for something completely unrelated (namely the Rock Ridge extensions to ISO 9660), I came across a cache of old X3T9 committee documents from 1990. In retrospect I’m a little surprised that I hadn’t found these earlier, since the … Continue reading

Posted in IDE, PC history, Standards | 17 Comments