alt Hacker News> 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.
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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.
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.
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...
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/