Once upon a time, I loved SCSI. (Was: Help! Is this kernel or hardwareproblem?)

[Bill McGonigle]

On Nov 27, 2005, at 18:05, Benjamin Scott wrote:

>> ... and Mac's 25-pin-looks-like-a-serial-connector bit).
>
>   Apple Kludge.  It was "SCSI" in the same way that "Windows 95" was a 
> multi-tasking, memory-protected operating system.

How were the SCSI Macs a kludge?  They had a full SCSI implementation, 
could run hard disks, scanners, printers, etc. with almost no fuss, 
(assuming you got the termination right - good quality terminators, 
right cable lengths, etc.).  Everybody supported it and there were some 
hells-on-wheels SCSI utilities for the Mac (we used to clone 35 SCSI 
drives simultaneously hanging off a Mac IIfx). The Powerbooks were the 
first laptops with access to external storage.

I did Mac and PC tech support in the early 90's and the Mac SCSI gear 
always worked when it was cabled correctly - the Adaptec DOS drivers 
and ASPI were a bit more persnickety.

Then when mkLinux came around I could take the stack of old 40GB drives 
and make a good fileserver out of the older Macs. :)  Actually, Adaptec 
SCSI on Linux was fine too - my first linux box was a 486/25 with an a 
Sound Blaster SCSI II hooked to a Bernoulli 150 (When RedHat came out I 
bought another cartridge to try it out instead of just overwriting 
Slackware).  But most users back then weren't so enlightened when it 
came to their choice of operating systems.

-Bill

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