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The Secret History of ATAPI
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- monocasa 5y agoAn interesting point that isn't made super clear in the article: ATAPI basically _is_ SCSI, just encapsulated in ATA commands over an ATA bus. This is possible because SCSI is more a network protocol with a lot underlying physical encapsulations. The PI in ATAPI stands for [SCSI] Packet Interface. So it's no wonder that ATAPI killed off SCSI CD drives in PCs. Since it _was_ SCSI, it really just killed off having to buy an extra host bus adapter card to send the same command set.
- Turing_Machine 5y ago> it really just killed off having to buy an extra host bus adapter card to send the same command set. Sometimes that stuff could get pretty baroque. Back in the day I had a 20 MB HD for my Atari 8 bit computer, which involved an adapter from the Atari proprietary bus to SCSI/SASI, then a second adapter from SCSI to the MFM HD interface. You needed one of the custom DOSes to make use of it, as the standard Atari DOS had never envisioned things like hard drives.
- boondaburrah 5y agoWe had a lot of SCSI devices in my house, and I think maybe like, 2 devices had the same connector. Even ZIP and JAZ, both by iomega, couldn't agree. The Atari ST in my place also has an ACSI connector, which is my guess, SCSI but yet more different somehow. At that point I didn't even want plug'n'play or hotplug because getting something set up once was enough for you to never desire to change it.
- wazoox 5y agoI still have a huge crate of SCSI cables for my obsolete gear. Stuff like 25 pins to 50, 50 to 68, 68 to 80 pins, HVD and LVD cables with a bunch of various connectors, cables with integrated passive or active terminators, terminators that only terminate the high bits, cables with 3 connectors (yes, really) for devices with only one SCSI port, etc. Like the old saying goes, "there are valid technical reasons that demand that you sacrifice a black goat here and there to your SCSI chain".
- xattt 5y agoSCSI was the unobtainium of my childhood. There was one day where we had a borrowed SCSI card in the family computer for a Zip drive and a scanner and I felt like I lived in the future for a brief moment.
- Turing_Machine 5y agoSCSI was definitely whizzy for its day, but man, was it ever finicky to get working and keep working. As a previous commenter noted, if you got a setup that worked you were reluctant to change anything.
- samstave 5y agoit woulg be wonders if you could give a history of the JAZZ drive and the other iomega things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaz_drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaz_drive
- kstrauser 5y agoAh, Jaz. My college buddy had one and we christened it the WORN Drive: Write Once, Read Never.
- samstave 5y agoLove it... We can say same of DATA "Dicussed, Archived, Translated, Attributed (Falsely)"
- mbreese 5y agoI had one and it was horrible. It was a fancier version of /dev/null. I had a bad disk once and whatever happened affected the drive head. This of course meant that every other disk I had was then similarly corrupted. I know people that used many Zip drives and were quite happy with them, but I never trusted Iomega again after that.
- JaimeThompson 5y agoThe Iomega click of death! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_of_death#Iomega_Zip_drives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_of_death#Iomega_Zip_driv...
- userbinator 5y agoUSB Mass Storage (bulk only, at least) is also SCSI-based.
- formerly_proven 5y agoThe old USB mass storage class was custom, but USB 3.0 and up enclosures should do UASP (USB Ander SCSI Protocol).
- mmastrac 5y agoI assume you mean "USB Attached SCSI Protocol" :)
- userbinator 5y agoNo, it's always been SCSI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_mass_storage_device_class#Device_access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_mass_storage_device_class#... UAS is yet another variant of passing SCSI commands through USB.
- formerly_proven 5y agoThanks, TIL. Always thought the new thing about UASP was direct SCSI support, but it actually seems like the main problem with BOT was it being fully synchronous, so only one request in flight at any given time.
- chadcatlett 5y agoTo continue the circle of life there is SCSI/ATA translation for tunneling ATA in SCSI. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCSI_%2F_ATA_Translation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCSI_%2F_ATA_Translation
- pajko 5y agoHard disks attached to the system as an ordinary mass storage device tend to disappear completely from the bus in case a bad sector has been hit. Learned about this while building RAID over USB at one of my former employers (don't ask). While SAT is virtually a passthrough over USB avoiding such disappearances and its presence is mandatory in, for example, data recovery scenarios. Before(?) SAT, there was Cypress' ATACB for the same purpose: https://www.cypress.com/documentation/datasheets/cy7c68300c-cy7c68301c-cy7c68320c-cy7c68321c-ez-usb-at2lp-usb-20-ataatapi https://www.cypress.com/documentation/datasheets/cy7c68300c-...
- AnotherGoodName 5y agoThe weirdest thing was the sound cards were basically "everything you need for multimedia" at the time. eg. Joystick, Midi and CD-ROM connectivity, etc were all on the sound card. So before ATAPI we still didn't buy a specific CD-ROM interface card to connect CD-ROM drives. We just bought a sound card that had the CD-ROM interface we needed. You just had to make sure you bought the right CD-ROM connectivity for your sound card.
- mikepurvis 5y agoIn the early days there were a lot of bundles you could buy that were a sound card + CD-ROM drive, and sometimes even speakers and software, eg: https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/sound-blaster-16-isa-bundle-cd-rom-1892465412 https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/sound-blaster-16-isa-... My first PC was a used 486DX in the mid-90s, and it had a Sound Blaster 16 (ISA) with the IDE connection on it for a CD-ROM drive. However, the motherboard also had its own dedicated primary and secondary IDE channels already, so it seemed simpler to just use those when I bought myself a CD-ROM drive, and avoid whatever hoops would have to be jumped through to make the sound-card-connected one work.
- bikson 5y agoOn the early DVD times also. Or you can play cds just from drive wihout system. Funny times.
- throwanem 5y agoBack ages ago, I had one of the CD-ROMs with full audio controls and analog out, and used it along with a bare AT PSU and one of those drive-bay equalizers as a desktop CD player, no proper computer involved anywhere.
- GeorgeDewar 5y agoIn the same vain, as a child of about 10 I used to use a CD-ROM drive hooked up to a PSU and headphones to listen to music in bed. It was lovely as a portable CD player would have been totally unaffordable to my family at the time.
- lizknope 5y agoI got my first PC in August 1994 and it had a Mitsumi 2X ATAPI CD-ROM. Everything I read said that Linux didn't support them yet. The drive worked fine in DOS/Win 3.1 which is what the computer shipped with. I downloaded Slackware 2.1 on floppy disks and installed from that. By the next Slackware release my ATAPI CD-ROM was supported and I mail ordered a CD and everything worked fine.
- sohkamyung 5y agoAh, memories. :-) I used to work on the ATAPI CD-ROM drives produced by Singapore's Creative Technologies.
- Match451 5y agoI wonder how creative stays in business. I see they still make sound cards, and they sell speakers/headsets. But they’re not exactly ubiquitous like they were back in the day.
- simondotau 5y agoInteresting that throughout the entire long article, the acronym for ATAPI was used without ever being described. It's quite the rabbit hole. ATAPI = "ATA Packet Interface" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATA_Packet_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATA_Packet_Interface ATA = "AT Attachment" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA AT = "Advanced Technology" (possibly apocryphal or a retronym) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer/AT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer/AT
- ggm 5y agothe varying SCSI plugging over its life is the bane of any modern day "can I read that tape" because you need the tape mechanicals to line up, but then you need the cable to be the right kind of left handed, reverse-frob, biwhiskit with bivalve mounted cliperators. ATAPI never had this problem as I understand it.
- dhosek 5y agoAh, those early days of CD-ROMs… I remember when they first came out, a blank CD-R disc was around $100. I remember trying to think of a use case for what could merit that level of expense. A couple months ago, while cleaning up around my desk, I ended up listing a spindle of about 500 blank CD-Rs on the free to a good home category on craigslist. It took a couple tries to get someone who actually came to pick it up. If only I had a time machine, I could have sent it to my 20-something self in the early 90s and sold them for $50,000 and then put that money into Apple stock. Where's my damn time machine?
- rasz 5y agoSomeone reads out atip, discovers disks manufactured by a company that doesnt exist yet and Xfiles raids your house. There are so many ways to mess up. If we got time travel in the next ~40 years Google could probably catch casual time bandits by tracking early meme and emoticon usage.
- unixhero 5y agoGreat that os2museum.com is hosting articles. It reminds me of the Internet of the past I loved. Decentralised and fine, like an unexplored forest.