SCSI: The Disk Bus for Everything
Early home PCs usually had a floppy disk and a simple hard disk controller. Later, IDE hard drives became the de facto standard. Of course, these days you're more likely to find a version of SATA connectors and, more recently, NVME connectors. But one standard before all that was very common in high-end systems: SCSI. [RetroBytes] recently made a video about the bus they call "80s USB".
Historically, Shugart, a record manufacturer, was tired of producing custom drive electronics for every device it made. Instead, they created discs with a standard interface, then produced a single interface card for each computer they wanted to support. The interface was very generic and they managed to get it standardized with ANSI, one of the first examples of the benefit of opening a standard.
SCSI can connect to many other things besides disks, such as scanners and tape drives. You can even find SCSI to network adapters. It was also fast for its time. There were also updated standards which increased performance over time. In addition to a standard hardware interface, most SCSI devices do not need special device drivers.
There were a few cheap SCSI host adapters for the PC, like the Seagate ST01 and ST02, but they weren't very good. Fast interfaces were quite expensive. Other hard drive connectors were less expensive and didn't require complicated termination or expensive cables. Thus, SCSI quickly lost ground in PCs, and as the PC market grew, it began to phase out SCSI in personal computers. But high-end workstations used SCSI because it performed better, and [RetroBytes] has a detailed explanation of why it was faster than early hard drive standards.
The video does a good job showing old hardware and many use cases for SCSI like RAID arrays and shared storage. If you feel like stepping back in time or like to learn about old technology, this video is worth watching. By the way, SCSI still exists, even though it is now a serial standard very similar to SATA. It's just not as prevalent as it used to be. You can bridge USB and SCSI, if you can find the hardware. You can also put today's small computers on the bus and pass them off as disk drives.
Early home PCs usually had a floppy disk and a simple hard disk controller. Later, IDE hard drives became the de facto standard. Of course, these days you're more likely to find a version of SATA connectors and, more recently, NVME connectors. But one standard before all that was very common in high-end systems: SCSI. [RetroBytes] recently made a video about the bus they call "80s USB".
Historically, Shugart, a record manufacturer, was tired of producing custom drive electronics for every device it made. Instead, they created discs with a standard interface, then produced a single interface card for each computer they wanted to support. The interface was very generic and they managed to get it standardized with ANSI, one of the first examples of the benefit of opening a standard.
SCSI can connect to many other things besides disks, such as scanners and tape drives. You can even find SCSI to network adapters. It was also fast for its time. There were also updated standards which increased performance over time. In addition to a standard hardware interface, most SCSI devices do not need special device drivers.
There were a few cheap SCSI host adapters for the PC, like the Seagate ST01 and ST02, but they weren't very good. Fast interfaces were quite expensive. Other hard drive connectors were less expensive and didn't require complicated termination or expensive cables. Thus, SCSI quickly lost ground in PCs, and as the PC market grew, it began to phase out SCSI in personal computers. But high-end workstations used SCSI because it performed better, and [RetroBytes] has a detailed explanation of why it was faster than early hard drive standards.
The video does a good job showing old hardware and many use cases for SCSI like RAID arrays and shared storage. If you feel like stepping back in time or like to learn about old technology, this video is worth watching. By the way, SCSI still exists, even though it is now a serial standard very similar to SATA. It's just not as prevalent as it used to be. You can bridge USB and SCSI, if you can find the hardware. You can also put today's small computers on the bus and pass them off as disk drives.
What's Your Reaction?
