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SCSI was that thing your dad's workstation had at work, and the rich kid had on his Mac.

I remember finding some older Adaptec cards for an early Linux box and they were still worth some change, even 5+ years old.

by Grazester1 hours ago|

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When I was in highschool in the later 90's I had an acquaintance that did graphic arts. He of course had a Mac with scsi everything, zip drive,scanner and printer.

It was cool and fascinating to me that only knew of the newly released USB, serial and parallel ports for external devices.

by EvanAnderson1 hours ago|

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I have a real soft spot in my heart for SCSI. I'm one of those crazy PC people who tried to use it, paid the "tax", and didn't necessarily come out ahead for it.

SCSI is a beautiful example of abstraction and standardization getting is Cool Stuff decades later. While there certainly are edge cases and it's not as 'tidy' as I'm making it out, it's really neat to me that a device like the BlueSCSI[0] can come along and bring a healthy dose of modernity to old platforms.

SCSI is at a sweet spot of general purpose capability and abstraction from the hardware (unlike, say, the Shugart floppy interface, or even ATAPI/IDE) that allows devices to be built to just plug-in and provide significant functionality to legacy platforms.

[0] https://bluescsi.com/

by toast01 hours ago|

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Incidentally, the early parallel port ZIP drives were really SCSI drives that had a parallel port to scsi converter on the board. Not that you could do anything cool with them, but pricing them lower than one with a SCSI interface is understanding the marketplace rather than anything else. The SCSI drives had two extra switches on the back, but used the same db25 connectors as the parallel port drives. People with Macs and other SCSI users were used to paying more.

I know there was a later revision parallel port ZIP drive that wasn't internally SCSI and that might have been lower cost.

by xattt53 minutes ago|

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You just unlocked a memory of the dual-personality PP/SCSI Zip drive that apparently sucked at both.

It’s amazing how much these problems went away when high speed USB came along.

by lysace2 hours ago|

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I would read these beautifully designed computer mags made for Mac people in creative areas in like 1987-1989 (like the Swedish Macworld). They routinely reviewed peripherals like SCSI scanners, hard drives etc costing like $10-25k (not inflation adjusted, so 2x those numbers). Crazy.

Computing was insanely expensive back then.

by jervant1 hours ago|

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And yet practically every Mac after 1986 had SCSI onboard. Why the PC industry didn't embrace it to avoid having to wait until USB is beyond me...

by TheCondor1 hours ago|

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You may not have ever had to deal with SCSI termination errors before. Earlier system had to have the device numbers manually assigned, if they were wrong, all sorts of weird things could happen (of just nothing would work)

I'm a SCSI fan, but it took a few revs to get it righted.

by EvanAnderson1 hours ago|

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SCSI was so much less tedious than dealing with IRQ / DMA / address hell on ISA cards, though. Once you understood it you could apply that knowledge across lots of platforms and devices. SCSI was much less arbitrary than dealing with random devices from manufacturers who each thought up their own way of setting configurable parameters (jumpers and DIP switches, option ROMs, tool you boot in DOS to frobnicate settings in an NVRAM, etc).

by TheCondor59 minutes ago|

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There is some truth in that. Like I said, I'm a fan, but I also remember some painful times where we were missing a physical terminator and at least twice adding a new device and had to check the jumpers on everything and someone one of the jumper blocks were upside down or maybe we couldn't tell which pin was 1 or something such that the devices were numbered wrong. We got it fixed and working every time though.

Aside from the time we lost a terminator for a few days, I never once felt like the scsi system couldn't work, it was just a matter of a really young me and my dad getting it sorted out. IRQ/DMA/ISA fuckery? There were multiple times I can remember getting a shiny new piece of hardware, that took months of begging my parents, and after getting things assembled thinking that "this configuration of devices" might not be possible to make work together.