Called the 'primary' and 'secondary' ATA interfaces, they were assigned to base addresses 0x1F0 and 0x170 on ISA bus systems. Physical ATA interfaces became a standard component in all PCs, initially on host bus adapters, sometimes on a sound card but ultimately as two physical interfaces embedded in a Southbridge chip on a motherboard. When a newer Serial ATA (SATA) was introduced in 2003, the original ATA was renamed to Parallel ATA, or PATA for short. The 'AT' in the IBM PC/AT referred to 'Advanced Technology' so ATA has also been referred to as 'Advanced Technology Attachment'.

The original ATA specifications published by the standards committees use the name 'AT Attachment'. The standard was originally conceived as the 'AT Bus Attachment,' officially called 'AT Attachment' and abbreviated 'ATA' because its primary feature was a direct connection to the 16-bit ISA bus introduced with the IBM PC/AT. It has largely been replaced by SATA in newer systems. For many years, ATA provided the most common and the least expensive interface for this application.

Because of this limit, the technology normally appears as an internal computer storage interface. Parallel ATA cables have a maximum allowable length of 18 in (457 mm). After the introduction of SATA in 2003, the original ATA was renamed to Parallel ATA, or PATA for short. As a result, many near-synonyms for ATA/ATAPI and its previous incarnations are still in common informal use, in particular Extended IDE (EIDE) and Ultra ATA (UATA). The ATA interface itself evolved in several stages from Western Digital's original Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) interface.

The Parallel ATA standard is the result of a long history of incremental technical development, which began with the original AT Attachment interface, developed for use in early PC AT equipment. It uses the underlying AT Attachment (ATA) and AT Attachment Packet Interface ( ATAPI) standards. The standard is maintained by the X3/ INCITS committee. The connection is used for storage devices such as hard disk drives, floppy disk drives, and optical disc drives in computers. It was first developed by Western Digital and Compaq in 1986 for compatible hard drives and CD or DVD drives. Parallel ATA ( PATA), originally AT Attachment, also known as IDE, is a standard interface designed for IBM PC-compatible computers. Two ATA motherboard sockets above, with an ATA connector below.

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