5 ms·

> Like many external drives in the 1980s and 90s, [Bernoulli] used a high-speed connection called SCSI. With SCSI… I was there when the old magic was written.

by xattt 4mo ago

> Like many external drives in the 1980s and 90s, [Bernoulli] used a high-speed connection called SCSI. With SCSI… I was there when the old magic was written. What a lot of PC history fails to capture is that SCSI was not ubiquitous. It was a “luxury” feature that you had to seek out for yourself as an add-on PCI card, and off-the-shelf consumer PCs did not come with these installed. SCSI peripherals came with a premium as well, so committing to SCSI meant consistently shelling out more with each upgrade. For example, in the mid-1990s, parallel port ZIP drives were the cheapest option for external “large volume” storage. An ATAPI internal or external SCSI ZIP drive had price differences that were significant enough to make you think twice about the value of your purchase. Edit: As an aside, the parallel port could act as dollar-store SCSI with daisy-chaining. We had the ZIP drive in line with a Pinnacle Studio 400, that terminated on an HP Deskjet 890Cxi (… for Windows) printer. It was a painful line-by-line experience trying to print, while doing a data transfer to/from the ZIP drive.

bombcar 4mo ago
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.
- Grazester 4mo ago
  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.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- deltarholamda 4mo ago
  Back in the day you had to go dig up an Adaptec 1542 or something similar if you wanted a CD-ROM on your Linux box. IDE CD-ROMs were essentially unsupported. Best part of SCSI was the required sorcery. "No no, young padawan, you must put the terminator on the scanner, not on the hard drive, lest your device chain causes the computer to no longer boot." I had a film scanner that would not work on any other SCSI ID that was not 4. Why? Because. Alacazam!
  - bombcar 4mo ago
    I can remember the day I switched to using Linux - the third coaster from the CD-burner that couldn't work under Windows 95 without dying, but Linux handled it fine while playing music if I reniced it. Terminators - now there's something I'm glad are gone, it was always fun finding out that something "auto-terminated" to "help" you.
lysace 4mo ago
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.
jervant 4mo ago
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...
- TheCondor 4mo ago
  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.
  - EvanAnderson 4mo ago
    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).
    - TheCondor 4mo ago
      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.
- kmeisthax 4mo ago
EvanAnderson 4mo ago
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/ https://bluescsi.com/
toast0 4mo ago
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.
- xattt 4mo ago
  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.
  - doubled112 4mo ago
    And then UASP (USB attached SCSI protocol) brought them back. Or has the situation improved lately?
wincy 4mo ago
I remember what a big deal the Western Digital Raptor drives were since they were 10,000RPM on SATA instead of SCSI. All my teenage friends and I wanted a SCSI drive or a Raptor in the early 2000s (I had very nerdy friends). It was a huge boost for an early 2000s gaming PC until SSDs came along and absolutely obliterated them.
zerocrates 4mo ago
I remember the gradual shift in Linux both due to internal changes and changes to what machines generally had, from IDE/ATAPI/ATA to Serial ATA, meaning things switched over to the SCSI subsystem and your old familiar hda drive was now at sda, and maybe you needed to use sdparm instead of hdparm, that kind of thing. And I think even if you still had an old ATA system that eventually got pulled under the SCSI umbrella internally as well. Though now there's separation again with NVME being its own separate system.
ForOldHack 4mo ago
Pay the tax of - reliability problems, ever one came with a cable, where is the termination, each had power, need another power strip...etc, etc, etc. as well, as Wide SCSI, so all your 50 pin stuff needed to get upgraded to 68pin... Bernoulli... ultra reliable. Zip? Clock was ticking on the click of death. Bernoullis were not the fastest, but they were the quietest and most reliable.
- firecall 4mo ago
  The kids today will never know the horrors! I used to have SCSI Terminators in my tech support bag. I still have some somewhere… And the size and thickness of some of those SCSI cables!
firecall 4mo ago
SCSI my old friend! Much of the black magic art of Mac support back in the 80s and 90s was getting SCSI chains sorted out! Sorting out the device order, swapping out cables, that sort of thing. I once spoke to a client who said they’d been happily running a single external SCSI drive hooked up to two Macs at the same time….
0xcde4c3db 4mo ago
As far as I understand it in retrospect (having grown up in a strictly PC household and later investigating "retro" platforms where SCSI was standard), SCSI was not inherently expensive. It's more that for PC platforms, ATA provided a hack that was cheaper at the time, which led to a bifucation of the market. ATA roughly turned HDDs into a subset of the ISA bus, which in turn originated as a buffered version of the CPU bus. That led to SCSI being at a premium on PC platforms because the target market was limited to customers for whom ATA wasn't good enough (mainly because they wanted more drives or longer cables than the thin translations of ATA could support).
scw 4mo ago
As a kid, my first machine was a 486 DX2 66. My dad mandated we buy on value, and I scoured the MicroTimes looking for the best possible deal, finally settling on a machine from a small independent shop off of South Bascom Ave in San Jose. The office smelt like burnt coffee and exhaust from burning-in PCs, but the machine was awesome: a PCI video card, and as we later found out, a built-in SCSI adapter which meant we needed to throw in another $240 for an Adaptec SCSI controller when we later upgraded to Pentium.
yial 4mo ago
I have fond memories of SCSI. I by chance had purchased a workstation, using almost all of the money I had saved at the time as a kid. While dated, and late in the SCSI days, the SCSI HDD and AGP video slot seemed mind blowing in their capabilities. Though, I remember a lot of turmoil at times getting certain software to work on the processor configuration and the originally installed video card which was distinctly not meant for gaming despite huge amounts of memory. (Huge in context of the times..)
wolvoleo 4mo ago
Well it was standard on some computer systems. Macs as I remember, and most unix workstations. It was just not common in PCs but it was standard in more serious systems. It spawned some higher speed versions like ultra wide scsi 3. And it's still used today in the form of serially attached scsi / SAS. And UASP over usb. If anything the PC market was the odd one out. With first MFM/RLL and later IDE/ATA. Of course it didn't feel like that because that's what most of us had.

by xattt 4mo ago

bombcar 4mo ago

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.

Grazester 4mo ago
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.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
deltarholamda 4mo ago
Back in the day you had to go dig up an Adaptec 1542 or something similar if you wanted a CD-ROM on your Linux box. IDE CD-ROMs were essentially unsupported. Best part of SCSI was the required sorcery. "No no, young padawan, you must put the terminator on the scanner, not on the hard drive, lest your device chain causes the computer to no longer boot." I had a film scanner that would not work on any other SCSI ID that was not 4. Why? Because. Alacazam!
- bombcar 4mo ago
  I can remember the day I switched to using Linux - the third coaster from the CD-burner that couldn't work under Windows 95 without dying, but Linux handled it fine while playing music if I reniced it. Terminators - now there's something I'm glad are gone, it was always fun finding out that something "auto-terminated" to "help" you.

lysace 4mo ago

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.

jervant 4mo ago

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...

TheCondor 4mo ago
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.
- EvanAnderson 4mo ago
  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).
  - TheCondor 4mo ago
    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.
kmeisthax 4mo ago

EvanAnderson 4mo ago

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/ https://bluescsi.com/

toast0 4mo ago

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.

xattt 4mo ago
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.
- doubled112 4mo ago
  And then UASP (USB attached SCSI protocol) brought them back. Or has the situation improved lately?

wincy 4mo ago

I remember what a big deal the Western Digital Raptor drives were since they were 10,000RPM on SATA instead of SCSI. All my teenage friends and I wanted a SCSI drive or a Raptor in the early 2000s (I had very nerdy friends). It was a huge boost for an early 2000s gaming PC until SSDs came along and absolutely obliterated them.

zerocrates 4mo ago

I remember the gradual shift in Linux both due to internal changes and changes to what machines generally had, from IDE/ATAPI/ATA to Serial ATA, meaning things switched over to the SCSI subsystem and your old familiar hda drive was now at sda, and maybe you needed to use sdparm instead of hdparm, that kind of thing. And I think even if you still had an old ATA system that eventually got pulled under the SCSI umbrella internally as well. Though now there's separation again with NVME being its own separate system.

ForOldHack 4mo ago

Pay the tax of - reliability problems, ever one came with a cable, where is the termination, each had power, need another power strip...etc, etc, etc. as well, as Wide SCSI, so all your 50 pin stuff needed to get upgraded to 68pin... Bernoulli... ultra reliable. Zip? Clock was ticking on the click of death. Bernoullis were not the fastest, but they were the quietest and most reliable.

firecall 4mo ago
The kids today will never know the horrors! I used to have SCSI Terminators in my tech support bag. I still have some somewhere… And the size and thickness of some of those SCSI cables!

firecall 4mo ago

SCSI my old friend! Much of the black magic art of Mac support back in the 80s and 90s was getting SCSI chains sorted out! Sorting out the device order, swapping out cables, that sort of thing. I once spoke to a client who said they’d been happily running a single external SCSI drive hooked up to two Macs at the same time….

0xcde4c3db 4mo ago

As far as I understand it in retrospect (having grown up in a strictly PC household and later investigating "retro" platforms where SCSI was standard), SCSI was not inherently expensive. It's more that for PC platforms, ATA provided a hack that was cheaper at the time, which led to a bifucation of the market. ATA roughly turned HDDs into a subset of the ISA bus, which in turn originated as a buffered version of the CPU bus. That led to SCSI being at a premium on PC platforms because the target market was limited to customers for whom ATA wasn't good enough (mainly because they wanted more drives or longer cables than the thin translations of ATA could support).

scw 4mo ago

As a kid, my first machine was a 486 DX2 66. My dad mandated we buy on value, and I scoured the MicroTimes looking for the best possible deal, finally settling on a machine from a small independent shop off of South Bascom Ave in San Jose. The office smelt like burnt coffee and exhaust from burning-in PCs, but the machine was awesome: a PCI video card, and as we later found out, a built-in SCSI adapter which meant we needed to throw in another $240 for an Adaptec SCSI controller when we later upgraded to Pentium.

yial 4mo ago

I have fond memories of SCSI. I by chance had purchased a workstation, using almost all of the money I had saved at the time as a kid. While dated, and late in the SCSI days, the SCSI HDD and AGP video slot seemed mind blowing in their capabilities. Though, I remember a lot of turmoil at times getting certain software to work on the processor configuration and the originally installed video card which was distinctly not meant for gaming despite huge amounts of memory. (Huge in context of the times..)

wolvoleo 4mo ago

Well it was standard on some computer systems. Macs as I remember, and most unix workstations. It was just not common in PCs but it was standard in more serious systems. It spawned some higher speed versions like ultra wide scsi 3. And it's still used today in the form of serially attached scsi / SAS. And UASP over usb. If anything the PC market was the odd one out. With first MFM/RLL and later IDE/ATA. Of course it didn't feel like that because that's what most of us had.