> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
SCSI cost too much for the extremely cost-conscious PC market of the early 90s. They'd already consolidated down all the IBM PC legacy buses (e.g. parallel, serial, AT keyboard interface etc) into a single chip that cost peanuts.
USB started off as a way to replace the legacy buses with something even cheaper, so naturally the PC industry bit. It wasn't really even supposed to do SCSI things; that was Firewire's job. We didn't get equivalent performance out of USB up until version 3.0 which isn't even the same bus as USB 2.0.
The underlying tension is that there are two different kinds of computers that want to do different things with their I/O:
1. The "SCSI philosophy" is to make peripherals that feel like extensions of the high-end computer you just bought.
2. The "USB philosophy" is to give you the cheapest connection you can get to a thing that works.
A good example of this philosophical divide is daisy-chaining. SCSI, Firewire, and Thunderbolt all supported it because it's the premium way of doing things. USB makes you buy a hub separately if you want more connectivity. Or, alternatively, you can look at this as SCSI and it's successors forcing you to buy a hub with every device you plug into them.
You might think that USB won out, but really, this debate still rages on, because Thunderbolt wound up being rolled up into USB-C and USB4. So now USB has to be both a cheap and premium bus - hell, Thunderbolt even used daisy-chaining instead of hubs on USB! This is why USB-C cables and devices are a mess; they designed USB-C specifically so you could flood the market with cheap 2.0-only cables that are only ever going to be used for power; and super-premium USB4/DP cables for plugging your laptop into a $200 laptop dock just to get back the ports you should have had anyway.
And, I must stress this enough, most of those fancy USB-C altmodes never made it to desktop anyway. I think you can buy Thunderbolt cards that will mux DisplayPort but you have to use a wrap-around cable to go from your GPU to your TB card like we're back in the 3dfx Voodoo2 era or something. Most of USB-C's single cable functionality is super-premium stuff that required a level of internal integration that desktop never committed to. Which is, again, very SCSI-brained, except now the cheap consumer stuff has it and the expensive modular desktops don't.
The Wii U walked so that the Switch could run. I'm glad to see renewed interest in it. Now if we only had a decent emulator. I know Cemu exists but the compatibility of most games I want to play with it is atrocious.
Dolphin only supports Wii games, not Wii U. This is part of the reason the Wii U flopped is that people thought it was just a peripheral for the original Wii and not a separate new console.
Dolphin is indeed fantastic for Wii/gamecube games though
I used my paper route money to add storage to my Mac 660AV.
My options were a SCSI hard disk, SyQuest or a Zip drive. I went with the latter. Since it was SCSI it wasn't appreciably slower than the internal HDD so I had a disk with MS Office installed, disk with all my games, etc that I'd swap out for what I was doing.
I was happy with my choice a year later when SyQuest had gone out of business and I had 4x as much storage as I would have had with just buying a hard disk.
Three years later I suffered the click of death and I was less happy. I used some hack I read on Usenet about cutting off the outer 1mm rim of the disk with nail scissors which let me rescue my data.
The only true "click of death" involved physically damaged disks. It was possible for a damaged disk to also damage any drive it was inserted in. Outside of that, the "click of death" was really just the drive retracting and reinserting the head on a read error.
I experienced click of death using my zip disks at a school lab.
The disk breaks the drive, drive breaks the disk spiral made communal drives rapidly not an option. There was a utility available that I used to fix my disk, but then I only used my disks in my drive after that experience.
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.
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/
I remember finding some older Adaptec cards for an early Linux box and they were still worth some change, even 5+ years old.
It was cool and fascinating to me that only knew of the newly released USB, serial and parallel ports for external devices.
Though now there's separation again with NVME being its own separate system.
I know there was a later revision parallel port ZIP drive that wasn't internally SCSI and that might have been lower cost.
It’s amazing how much these problems went away when high speed USB came along.
Or has the situation improved lately?
Computing was insanely expensive back then.
I'm a SCSI fan, but it took a few revs to get it righted.
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.
USB started off as a way to replace the legacy buses with something even cheaper, so naturally the PC industry bit. It wasn't really even supposed to do SCSI things; that was Firewire's job. We didn't get equivalent performance out of USB up until version 3.0 which isn't even the same bus as USB 2.0.
The underlying tension is that there are two different kinds of computers that want to do different things with their I/O:
1. The "SCSI philosophy" is to make peripherals that feel like extensions of the high-end computer you just bought.
2. The "USB philosophy" is to give you the cheapest connection you can get to a thing that works.
A good example of this philosophical divide is daisy-chaining. SCSI, Firewire, and Thunderbolt all supported it because it's the premium way of doing things. USB makes you buy a hub separately if you want more connectivity. Or, alternatively, you can look at this as SCSI and it's successors forcing you to buy a hub with every device you plug into them.
You might think that USB won out, but really, this debate still rages on, because Thunderbolt wound up being rolled up into USB-C and USB4. So now USB has to be both a cheap and premium bus - hell, Thunderbolt even used daisy-chaining instead of hubs on USB! This is why USB-C cables and devices are a mess; they designed USB-C specifically so you could flood the market with cheap 2.0-only cables that are only ever going to be used for power; and super-premium USB4/DP cables for plugging your laptop into a $200 laptop dock just to get back the ports you should have had anyway.
And, I must stress this enough, most of those fancy USB-C altmodes never made it to desktop anyway. I think you can buy Thunderbolt cards that will mux DisplayPort but you have to use a wrap-around cable to go from your GPU to your TB card like we're back in the 3dfx Voodoo2 era or something. Most of USB-C's single cable functionality is super-premium stuff that required a level of internal integration that desktop never committed to. Which is, again, very SCSI-brained, except now the cheap consumer stuff has it and the expensive modular desktops don't.
Dolphin is indeed fantastic for Wii/gamecube games though
Before usb sticks, zip disk was the only way to move medium to large files, other than burn a cd.
My options were a SCSI hard disk, SyQuest or a Zip drive. I went with the latter. Since it was SCSI it wasn't appreciably slower than the internal HDD so I had a disk with MS Office installed, disk with all my games, etc that I'd swap out for what I was doing.
I was happy with my choice a year later when SyQuest had gone out of business and I had 4x as much storage as I would have had with just buying a hard disk.
Three years later I suffered the click of death and I was less happy. I used some hack I read on Usenet about cutting off the outer 1mm rim of the disk with nail scissors which let me rescue my data.
The disk breaks the drive, drive breaks the disk spiral made communal drives rapidly not an option. There was a utility available that I used to fix my disk, but then I only used my disks in my drive after that experience.
I never had it happen either, but I used SyQuest drives more, and then moved to CD-R (which was the real click of death for Zip disks)
It was a design issue.