> I'm not sure what they used for 286 era machines for hard drives but I suspect it was plain old IDE, It was not. It was the precursor to IDE, where the driv

> I'm not sure what they used for 286 era machines for hard drives but I suspect it was plain old IDE, It was not. It was the precursor to IDE, where the drive was just a disk and head actuator, and all the magnetic signal decoding electronics were onboard an ISA card plugged into an ISA slot. What was initially offered as the first "IDE" was taking the analog electronics on that ISA card and moving them onboard the drive and just "extending" (essentially) the ISA bus out to the drive.