Early house PCs normally had a floppy disk and a easy laborious drive controller. Later, IDE laborious drives grew to become the defacto customary. After all, today, you usually tend to discover some model of SATA and — recently — NVME connectors. However a normal predating all of this was quite common in high-end methods: SCSI. [RetroBytes] lately did a video on the bus which he calls the “USB of the 80s.”

Traditionally, Shugart — a maker of disks — was uninterested in producing customized drive electronics for every machine they made. As a substitute, they made disks with a normal interface after which produced a single interface board for every laptop they needed to assist. The interface was very generic, they usually have been capable of get it standardized with ANSI — an early instance of the good thing about opening up a normal.

SCSI might connect with many issues apart from disks, like scanners and tape drives. You can even discover SCSI to community adapters. It was quick for its day,  too. There have been additionally up to date requirements that pushed efficiency larger over time. Along with a normal {hardware} interface, most SCSI gadgets didn’t want particular machine drivers.

There have been just a few low cost SCSI host adapters for the PC, just like the Seagate ST01 and ST02, however they weren’t good performers. Quick interfaces have been fairly costly. The opposite laborious drive connectors have been cheaper and didn’t require difficult termination and costly cables. So SCSI quickly misplaced floor within the PC, and because the PC market grew, it began pushing out SCSI in private computer systems. However high-end workstations used SCSI as a result of it carried out higher, and [RetroBytes] has an in depth clarification of why it was sooner than early laborious drive requirements.

The video does a pleasant job of displaying off some grand outdated {hardware} and plenty of use instances for SCSI like RAID arrays and shared storage. You probably have the urge to stroll down reminiscence lane otherwise you like studying about outdated know-how, this video is price a learn. SCSI continues to be round, by the best way, though now it’s a serial customary that’s similar to SATA. It simply isn’t practically as prevalent because it was once. You’ll be able to bridge USB and SCSI, if you’ll find the {hardware}. You can too put right now’s tiny computer systems on the bus and have them faux to be disk drives.