SCSI For Laptops Over PCMCIA - Adaptec SlimSCSI

[@JacGoudsmit]

I have an APA1480 SCSI adapter for PC-Card (also referred to as PCMCIA but different I think) and it has a 50 pin Centronics cable as well as a SCSI2 high density cable. SCSI may seem like a hassle for people nowadays who are used to USB but it was absolutely amazing in the 1990s. I had multiple CD recorders and a whopping 6GB hard disk (from the time that IDE could only do 1GB or so), as well as an IOmega Jaz (1GB removable disks), and I think I used to have a SCSI document scanner too. You can even connect multiple computers to the same peripherals: I once had a Sun workstation connected to the same SCSI bus as my PC, and that made it possible to use the CD drive in my computer from the SCSI workstation. It could even access the hard disks but obviously MS-DOS and Windows (98) weren't too happy about hard disk data changing without them changing it. So I had to make sure to hit Ctrl+Numlock during DOS startup to access the hard disks from the Sun, lest DOS or Windows would crash. Oh, one more thing: The Adaptec EZ-SCSI software will really help to stay sane. One of my favorite things to do with SCSI was to connect a DDS-2 tape drive and use a program that came with EZ-SCSI to make a tape drive show up as a DOS drive, and put MP3 files on it. You could actually play the mp3 files from tape that way. And of course if you have a DDS-1 drive and some software, you can record music straight to DAT tapes that can be played on hifi DAT players.

[@Artemis-zl5cs]

SCSI is pretty great (or was, perhaps) in the right applications. I still use a SCSI drive with my personal system to back up my really important data onto MO disks.

[@SwitchingPower]

PC-Card is basically just the 16bit ISA bus, CardBus has a gold shielding bar over the connector because that one is just a 32bit PCI bus. Also the BlueSCSI is designed to be powered from the SCSI termination power witch the SCSI adapter might not provide witch could explain it not showing up because it might not got any power.

[@MrLurchsThings]

SCSI always reminds me of the old saying “That’s the beauty of standards, there are so many to choose from”.

[@Otakunopodcast]

As much of a pain as SCSI was, it really did offer a performance boost. Maybe not quite 10x as claimed, but it was noticeably faster/more efficient than competing drive interfaces (namely IDE.) IDE finally caught up (more or less) in the Ultra ATA days, which is why Apple (which was pretty much the only consumer level company to use SCSI) switched to IDE for its later Power Macs. And yeah, the various cabling standards were a mess. But in reality I never really had a problem with it. Pretty much the only SCSI cables I needed back in the day were a DB25 to Centronics 50 pin (to connect my Mac with the first SCSI device) and Centronics 50 to Centronics 50 (to daisy chain multiple devices) and 50 pin ribbon cables (to connect internal SCSI devices,) I don't think I ever saw any external SCSI devices that didn't use the Centronics 50 connector. There may have been one or two (my memory is starting to degrade...) but they were definitely in the minority, at least in my experience. It was only after I moved to the PC world when I started to have to deal with all the other weird SCSI connectors (HD50, 68 pin Wide SCSI, etc.) Fortunately, like I mentioned earlier, IDE got "good enough" to where I could ditch SCSI and go full IDE. And yeah, I do believe I had one of those Adaptec SlimSCSIs back in the day as well. Brings back memories. And I also remember those PCMCIA card jewel cases too, they were pretty cute. And I also had a SyQuest drive. They were indeed incredibly cool. I just loved the sound of flipping the load lever, hearing the heads slot into place with that nice solid "clunk" sound, and then the whine of the motor as the drive platter came up to speed. I even had one of those mini SyQuest drives installed in my tower PC. Was really bummed when Zip drives/disks became the de facto standard, they just weren't as "cool" as SyQuest drives imho. (Iomega mostly redeemed themselves in my eyes with the Jaz drive tho, the noises those made when you loaded them were pretty good, although not as viscerally satisfying as slapping the load lever on a full size SyQuest cartridge.)

[@AiOinc1]

The SCSI DB-25 connector was not terribly uncommon on optical drives and things like ZIP and Jaz drives. Lots of tape storage systems like Ditto and early LTO drives also had it before the LVDS cables showed up.

[@stuartcastle2814]

Not denying it was more efficient. It was a lot more efficient. There is a reason high end systems requiring lots of data throughput used it, and it wasn't because the users liked the bragging rights. It was because the industries those users worked in require huge amounts of data processed as quickly as possible.

[@FrankConforti]

@@AiOinc1 The DB25 “standard” connector was introduced by Apple. Had they not pushed for a smaller connector to fit on the back of the original Macintosh “classic” system, the 50 pin Centronics connector would have been the standard until IBM came in with a more innovative connector. Full RS-232 connectors in Macs were a problem with noise as not every connection was not properly shielded by a ground so it was always hamstrung in speed and reliability. Another Steve Jobs intervention.

[@Thought-Forms]

The secret is out now! I grabbed one of these to send samples up/down from an old Dell Latitude (XP) to some old Akai samplers. Worked very easily - on par with the Adaptec PCI SCSI cards without having to have the bulk of a big desktop or a pricey G3 with built in SCSI ports

[@mb2776]

haha, I clicked on the video to check out these cards for connecting it to akai samplers^^

[@AlyxxTheRat]

That's really cool. SCSI is something I never looked into much, so it's fascinating to learn about it and how complex it was. Probably not surprising it got phased out into more of a legacy thing when USB became the new standard. And that SyQuest drive is one of the coolest pieces of tech I've seen. Probably used more for data backups but having 200 MB swappable disks at the time must've been very useful in general.

[@random007nadir]

SCSI is still alive today with SAS and fiber channel devices, and the extremely useful iSCSI over ethernet.

[@N0zer0]

Don't forget about USB-UASP either.

[@AnonymousFreakYT]

The "Easy 1-2-3" is based on their specifically mentioned use case - Iomega Zip, Jaz, etc. These were "commodity/consumer" devices, usually pre-set to a "usual SCSI ID" that were different from device type (So Zip was defaulted to 5, Jaz to 4, IIRC.) I'm also betting they assumed someone would only ever plug in one single device at a time. And the default plug was correct for Jaz, the adapter for Zip. And Windows 95 OSR2 would have included drivers built-in. Windows not even offering to use the existing drivers means something is wonky with your Windows install. Maybe Gateway ripped out the drivers to save drive space?

[@kaitlyn__L]

Definitely - a self terminating SCSI zip drive or CD drive as the only one or two things on the bus would be pretty easy. It’s when you do the power user stuff that it starts to get annoying

[@AlyxxTheRat]

I think Iomega did make a PCMCIA Clik drive at some point, though that format was prone to failure so something like this might have still been preferable.

[@adamsfusion]

I had dozens of those little PCMCIA plastic cases. Every card I purchased came with one, and I had my share of Wi-Fi cards filed like a stack of mixtapes.

[@henrikgustav2294]

Pcmcia cards to me are still amazeballs. How they were able to cram all those components in a tiny card - scsi, sound card, modem, etc etc

[@thegardenofeatin5965]

I had a PCMCIA mouse. It plugged in and charged from the PC card slot, you popped it out, it had a little kick stand that worked as the power switch, and it connected to the machine via bluetooth. It existed in a VERY narrow window of time.

[@nathantron]

Thank you for archiving the Driver disk!!!!! OMG!!! I LOVE YOU!

[@SameAsAnyOtherStranger]

I used to pick up all kinds of SCSI stuff for cheap or free when USB came out. I probably paid more for cables and adaptors new than I paid for SCSI peripherals, not including $85 for a 2.2 gig hard drive for an 8100 Power Mac and $650 for a sound sampler. I used to have a huge SCSI flatbed scanner that was faster and more detailed than any scanner I have seen since.

[@TheNets]

This is the best video that I ever saw about SCSI haha. Whenever someone asks me what SCSI is, I'll reference this video!!! The beginning of the video with all the interfaces was the best! Haha

[@IoIxD]

What would really be awesome to use with this is the RaSCSI, which lets you emulate many SCSI devices over the bus using a Raspberry pi, including wifi!

[@stamasd8500]

I have used PCMCIA SCSI for a long time. In the late 1990s I had a Thinkpad 755CX laptop (Pentium 75) which did not have a CDROM drive. I bought a Panasonic KXL-D745 external CDROM for it, it was SCSI and came with its own PCMCIA adapter. The adapter card was actually a 2-in-one thing: both a SCSI controller, and and audio card. It connects to the CDROM through a double cable, one SCSI and one audio, and can play computer audio through the speakers built into the CD drive. Very cool for that period laptops that had a tendency to not have either CD units nor audio. In my case the audio part was actually creating conflicts with the Thinkpad's built-in Mwave audio board, so I ended up disabling the audio part of the PCMCIA in device manager. I even installed Windows 98 from that external CDROM onto the laptop, because the SCSI PCMCIA card did have DOS drivers. :) I still have that whole setup, and it still works. You could also use the external CDROM from that bundle as a standalone CD player, it could be powered by AA batteries too and played audio CDs through its own speakers while not connected to a computer. Battery life was pretty horrible though, maybe 2h of music before it needed new ones. I should also mention that by going to DB-25 in your SCSI adapter chain you have introduced a bottleneck on the bus, the HD-50 and Centronics cables are 16-bit but the DB-25 is 8-bit SCSI only so you have halved your bus speed. But hey, working at half speed is better than not working at all if that's what you have to do. :)

[@boydpukalo8980]

I had one of those in the late 1990's while in college. Much better than parallel port, and back then there was no USB, nor firewire. Harder to configure than USB - yes, but the times counterpart that allowed multiple devices on a bus, unlike parallel, or the limited IDE. Cool video. Just received an Iomega SCSI to firewire adapter, and last year bought a PCI-E U320 SCSI controller for an XP build. Keep up the great videos.

[@nticompass]

A handful of SCSI devices have jumpers you can set to tell the device to be its own terminator. That's a nice thing :)

[@fenchurchmarie5224]

wow, a Liberty! I worked tech support in N SUX, SD ~1997. We had access to these as well as Handbooks in the lab. Great piece of kit, and now with SCSI!

[@WackyT08]

Adaptec has been my choice for SCSI for years. Back at Wright-Patt AFB in the mid 90's we had a Micron Win NT workstation PC that we ran 2 Adaptec SCSI cards on for automated mass CD duplication, large bed automated HP scanner, and 2 different color printers, one large format solid ink and a Kodak dye sublimation. There was only one cable and device ID configuration that all the devices were detected and worked properly. But once I found it, the workstation worked great for years.

[@MegaManNeo]

Honestly, I thought hooking up all those devices through SCSI to that old laptop looked super cool. Speaking of which, I heard the most recent episode of the Retro Hour Podcast with you in it and it was a fun hour to listen to.

[@tss20148]

Around 1996-97 I worked for a company which among other things sold a document management system. I used an Adaptec SlimSCSI to connect a Fujitsu document scanner to my laptop for demonstrations of the system.

[@PowerToolism]

This is really cool, and I actually use one of these quite often. I have an old ScanView drum scanner from the 90's that I scan my analog photography negatives on, and it uses one of these cards on a laptop with Windows XP installed with the scanner specific software on, and it works really well!

[@escgoogle3865]

I find it amazing how long it took consumer negative slide/negative scanners to catch up to professional/enthusiast products of the late 90's early 2000's.

[@michaelcarey]

I can remember having lots of "fun" using an ISA Adaptec SCSI card together with Windows 98 and various tape drives in the late 90s. When it worked it was fantastic, getting to the fantastic state took a lot of banging my head on the desk. Moving to Windows NT eased the pain a bit but it was still a struggle.

[@ajslim79]

18:30 curious how scsi works: does the data copy go directly from the cd drive to the syquest OR does it need to go to the Laptop first for computation or something?

[@alterhund4116]

The card is the host. The device 1 to 8 are most exclusively targets. They can not initiate SCSI transactions themselve. Peripheral-to-peripheral communications are uncommon, but possible. In the time, Unix, netware should can this. Windows and DOs not. For a little faster in time, Robocopy or Xcopy. Ncopy in netware, I know copies very fast in SCSI. But other OS never dev-to-dev. I think, this card run only 5 or 10 MHz. Very slow, because it is 16 Bit and use parallel SCSI. Sry 4 my bad english.

[@garbleduser]

@@alterhund4116 It wasn't that bad compared to most native english speakers. Don't doubt yourself!

[@abergethirty]

My libretto 50CT has a docking station. If you look underneath towards the back edge you'll see a multipin connector and a brass nuts on the back for thumb screws to hold the dock. With the dock you get stuff like serial ports and VGA. Mine came with PCIA adapters for 3.5 inch drive and pararalel adapter for a CD drive.

[@widicamdotnet]

Exactly - it never occurred to me that one could see the 50CT (or other Librettos) as a "connectivity-challenged" machine, but if you don't have the port replicator and other accessories, it would be. Still fun to put a Libretto and an EeePC side by side and realize that, despite being just 10 years apart, the only port they have in common is VGA.

[@ElectricEvan]

I don't understand everyone hating on SCSI. It's always just worked for me. Now I only ever used it with storage devices and the robots that shuffled their media around. Setting device numbers and termination wasn't such a big deal. The adapters weren't a big deal back when it was the dominant interface so adapters were plentiful. A few notes on SCSI in modern times. I suspect your card has a DOS command to rescan the bus. A lot of later generation SCSI adapters (glares at USB ones) don't support the full width of the address space. What I am saying is a lot of them only work for ID numbers you can fit in 1 or 2 bits (not the full). I have a Panasonic CDROM drive that's also a "Diskman" type thing and it came with a SCSI interface. It works in DOS and Windows 98 (I assume 95 as well). It used the included drivers. I don't have that laptop any more but I still have that drive and the adapter. My highschool had multiple large chassis that each held like 8 CDROM drives in it to act as cheap storage (slow) for common read only files. I had a lot of fun playing with that. Years later at work I got to work with Sun Workstations and Linux doing data recovery from DLT and they had a robotic DLT drive. So this thing had a robot arm that would shuffle the tapes around and inside it was just a normal off the shelf consumer DLT drive in it's plastic desktop style case just lashed down to the inside of the machine. They also had a lot of SCSI harddisks that were external. All of it worked pretty cleanly. All that old hardware worked in a modern linux install (gentoo) without any heroics (patching). The only problems I had were the SCSI card dying (it was old) and the replacement given to me was a USB device that lacked the full address bits. Also Solaris's compressed tape format doesn't seem to have a utility in linux.

[@MikeBohde]

I had the HP m820e external scsi cd writer when it came out. It was essentially an Adaptec scsi pc card + CD-R drive. It was a great solution that served me well for years.

[@pmacwhinnie]

Thanks!

[@funcamp_ltd.]

Killer stuff as always, Shelby. Are you planning on putting the driver image on archive or is it already readily available?

[@TechTangents]

It's up there now! archive.org/details/apa-1450A I'll get that added to the description

[@funcamp_ltd.]

@@TechTangents You're the best :)

[@BCProgramming]

@14:42 You can run fdisk directly from within windows in a command prompt. You can partition secondary or external disks this way.

[@bobblum5973]

You pointed out the Device ID number selector, but I didn't catch it if you mentioned that the SCSI controller occupies one of the IDs as well. Newer versions of SCSI support two controllers on the same bus at different IDs, allowing for failover capability and other tricks.

[@UpLateGeek]

*A lot of data to put through the SCSI bus. If you install from one drive to another on the same chain, the data should just go between the drives on the SCSI bus. It's not like IDE where the host computer has to read the data off one drive then write it to the other, the host just sends a command to copy the data from one drive to the other on the bus, and the controller and the drives just work all that out between them. I ran a SCSI machine back in the windows 98 days, and never had any issues. That was mostly internal drives going through an ISA card and later a PCI card. I did have a couple of external drives at various points, and never had any issues with them either. Although I did just go out and buy the right cables to begin with rather than use multiple adapters. The best part about running SCSI drives was that it basically made buffer underruns while burning CD-Rs or DVD-Rs a thing of the past. I could surf the web on my shitty underpowered machine while a disc burned, whereas my friends basically had to leave their machine untouched just in case some program decided to hog the CPU, memory, or drive I/O. The only time I ever had a buffer underrun was when I was having other system stability issues, which turned out to be my hard drive in the process of dying. Once I swapped out the drive, the system was back to stable with zero buffer underruns. So yeah, huge SCSI fanboi back in the day (if you couldn't tell).

[@theposguy1435]

I always liked the sysquest drives as well.. thanks for the video

[@aviphysics]

I had a scsi film scanner back in the day. It was an HP Photosmart device and I think it came with the SCSI PCI card.

[@urangerelenkhtuvshin5145]

studying more of your videos to begin to get comfortable. Thank you!

[@Jonoth]

the SCSI terminator reminds me a lot of a bunch of industrial communication protocols, like profinet (siemens), data highway (Allen Bradley), rs485, controlnet (Allen Bradley), devicenet (Allen Bradley). They all need terminators (which is just a resistor across two pins)

[@kaitlyn__L]

I reckon this card, a Libretto, and a Zip drive would’ve been a very competent little bundle for someone on the go. And SCSI isn’t particularly complicated when only plugging-in one device, especially as those drives self-terminated. So that would’ve been speed and reliability, plus expandability without losing portability. Really nice.

[@maltadevnull]

I really enjoy your videos man, you bring up interesting topics, have a nice voice and it's generally really quite enjoyable to watch your stuff. Buuuut, sometimes it feels like you don't really research or maybe grasp some bits about the current subject. MB it's just me misunderstanding but for example with PnP; as far as I remember it has nothing to do with drivers, it just means you don't have to assign IRQ and DMA and that windows detects the hardware automatically. It's rly not a big deal and I'm not trying to be an asshole, Im trying to be constructive and help so take it for what it is. Thanks for the video and keep up the good work❤❤❤

[@marcovtjev]

I had a Dell Latitude (A P-II 233 iirc), but it came with a pcmcia/cardbus slot and a docking station with PCI controller AND scsi controller (DB25), in the PCI slot I had some dual channel card. For on the move I had a cardbus adaptec card. I mostly used it to prepare harddisks for Powermacs and Amigas. We had the images on already large IDE disks, but the SCSI disks were all old and regularly died. As for adapters, I still have a (HP Proliant 1500) converter hanging on the wall, converting from some 100+ pin external scsi to two 68 pins. This connector was afaik on the original Smart Array cards.

[@tyttuut]

I found a similar one of these, also new in box, on eBay for $20 a few months ago. Score! Really handy gadget.

[@AiOinc1]

Crap, I bought this exact same card the day before your upload. Amazing. Mine was in box, though. I've had some reasonable success using it with my PowerBook G3 Kanga under Mac OS 9.1. Better than the internal SCSI speed-wise, I'd say.

[@AnonymousFreakYT]

Should I send you more of those PCMCIA cases? I have a bunch. In a variety of types.

[@FirstWizardZorander]

18:35 Was that 10 minutes or 10 hours? I'm hoping the former

[@ano_nymouse]

i have the 1460 one that i used to use a lot with my toshiba ultra slim laptop. it only had one pcmcia slot and no usb 2.0. i used to chain my camera that had scsi connector to the whole setup because i can use the camera to access additional pcmcia flash/memory card.

[@fattomandeibu]

I used a Squirrel branded one of these to connect a CD drive to an A1200(an old school early '90s microcomputer, a classic "wedge" all but the screen in one unit) which had a PCIMIA slot on the opposite side to the floppy drive.

[@kbhasi]

(7:59) 'Always archive first!' YES!! 😃

[@i80386sx]

I have the APA-1460A card. It's a great resource to have.

[@FrankConforti]

The passive criticism of SCSI in this video had me grinding my teeth. I’ve been using SCSI since late 1980s/early 90s on both Apple and IBM computers. SCSI was designed from the start to be hot swapped and everything from storage (R/W or read only) and other devices, all without shutting down the computer. I have used a SCSI video capture box directly into a 2010 Mini Mac and it worked as designed. More importantly, it sent the data directly to the SCSI storage device. Most of early Windows implementations did not use the SCSI to SCSI data transfer. It was designed from the start to be a command and forget system which means none of the data had to pass through the computer(s). I’ve used SCSI since it came out on Apple Mac 2 and never had a problem. When I moved to IBM P/S2 same thing. I’ve even used a connection between the two computers to pass at that time the fastest data transfer between the two computers with nothing more than connecting them up, making sure I had the the termination for both ends in place. At that time it was the fastest way to move data between the two totally different computers.

[@loganjoy-koer5936]

one of those 50 pin scsi connectors is in one of the nintendo gamecube devkits

[@kanalnamn]

There's LVD (low voltage differential) SCSI aswell... that might fit physically but can be harmed by regular SCSI-cards.

[@nickwallette6201]

Regular SCSI is single ended or LVD, which are both OK. HVD could damage devices not meant for it, but they were fairly rare.

[@TatsuZZmage]

i had one of those it worked really well.

[@NJRoadfan]

The reason for the slowness is that PCMCIA is pretty much ISA without the benefit of any DMA. There are DOS drivers for these out there, Adaptec was pretty good with support. I have the parallel port version of this, the APA-1350. It only came with Windows 9x drivers, but the cable uses the common Shuttle EPST chipset and Shuttle's drivers work fine on it. It's how I got a working CD-R drive on my netpliance iOpener!

[@jenna6132]

It's likely I just missed it in the video, but BlueSCSI can only be bus-powered sometimes. I'd guess you need USB power to run it on this setup? I have one in my Mac IIfx and it requires a floppy-style power connector. I use a bunch of similar stuff on my old machines! I have a few Jaz drives that work happily with Macs and SGI machines out of the box, plus plug 'n play with a USB adapter in modern Linux. All the Jaz drives use "HD50" which is much more compact than Centronics. Really helps the drives stay small while still being able to daisy chain them.

[@lesliespeaker668]

Those cases can be used as credit card holders, they have the exact same size for that.

[@michaelwood9866]

i have a cib sony external 4x cd drive and i believe it has a parallel card and a scsi card for desktop computers

[@Vanders456]

SCSI is hardware designed by software people, and IDE is hardware designed by hardware people, *and it shows*

[@TheErador]

I'm not sure I agree with that. SCSI is like super generic and not limited to a couple devices. It did suffer from multiple standards causing incompatibilities though. Unlike IDE which was limited to storage devices and things that presented as such. Admittedly auto scsi IDs would have been nice

[@bobblum5973]

Shugart Associates System Interface started it, but it evolved into SCSI (SCSI-1) fairly quickly. Various generations followed, with faster speeds, wider data widths, single-ended and differential signals, low- and high-voltage signals, all in the name of progress. The various types of connectors and numbers of pins had to evolve to keep up. Typically you could use those adapters between generations, often two together. But you had to know the limitations. There's not much difference between that and the ever-changing standards of USB connectors and device support over the years.

[@nickwallette6201]

I would argue that SCSI was designed very well. IDE was an extension cable for ISA slots, but with limited addressing. I don’t know what was up with all the connectors. Some make sense, others not so much. I think the standard didn’t actually define the connector, so it ended up being a bunch of de facto standards instead. But since the electrical spec was common between them, a passive adapter could bridge any gap you had (save for HVD), and if you have to buy a cable anyway, you could just get the one with the right combination of plugs for your card and device. The software was actually the weak point. Namely, that sometimes you wouldn’t have the combination of SCSI chipset driver, disk support, and CD support that were all compatible with each other. And Adaptec (and others) were willing to solve that problem for you - for a fee. By the time you added up the card, cables, adapters, and software, it was pretty difficult to justify. That’s why IDE was popular. It was cheap, and it was directly supported by the garbage OS we were all running - DOS. Via the BIOS, of course. Which was an option for SCSI usually as well, but some SCSI BIOSes were better than others, and they had their limitations.

[@bobblum5973]

@@nickwallette6201 I used SCSI on minicomputers and workstations through all of its generations, and had minimal troubles with it. IDE evolved over time, too. I recall the Compaq Portable II having a hard disk with an extra board on it, sort of a precursor to "real" IDE. Plus I still think I have an old 8-bit IDE drive kicking around that would not work on a 16-bit system or controller, I think it's a 20- or 40-meg drive. (Need to dig that up sometime...)

[@alexthemorgan]

No

[@blenderbuch]

I have such a beast. It worked for me for disk's and Scanner

[@LynxSnowCat]

I vaguely recall having to swap SCSI video adapter _cards_ a long time ago. I want to say it was SUN that used SCSI for their add-on cards, but it's been so long that I'm uncertain.

[@ForTheBirbs]

I had one of these Syquest drives. Ah, the memories.... Of adapters, jumpers, cable types... Not wrong

[@stuartcastle2814]

SCSI was frequently fiddly. I’ve spent many hours over the years essentially debugging scsi setups that didn’t work because a terminator is missing, has failed (and yes, they can) or there are duplicate ids. Add to that the fact that P&P under windows 95 was sometimes a bit flaky, as well as the fact that, even now, some,drivers are, at best, unreliable.

[@herdware]

I've got the 1460 variant. I think it has the Adaptec AIC-6360 chipset like the Sound Blaster ISA cards and some other Adaptec 15xx ISA SCSI cards. Which isn't too surprising I guess since PCMCIA more or less is ISA in another form factor. Never bothered trying it with DOS/Windows but it works fine with NetBSD. :)

[@nicholasmistry4954]

Just an FYI - These Slim-SCSI adapters had optional cables, for each of the different SCSI connector types. I personally own the DB25, Centronics and DH50 connector cables.

[@AmstradExin]

This is the EXACT setup to connect something to the Atari Falcon. :D

[@SPOONman4000]

I have one of these, as well as an iomega z250pcmcia which i''m pretty sure is the same (or at least very similar) internally because the same driver picks up both cards

[@kirishima638]

Old Mac user here. I never had to deal with more than two connectors and never had huge problems with 3 or 4 devices connected. It was far from perfect. Biggest issue was termination. But it was massively better than anything available on your typical home PC with its two internal IDE connections, drive jumpers and dumb parallel port. And SCSI was FAST. Fast enough to drive a display. Noticeable faster. When Apple started putting IDE drives in their budget performers they took a noticeable performance hit.

[@すどにむ]

"One standard port, one proprietary port". It's Steve Jobs' strategy, so the proprietary port can offer great experience while (inferior)standard port offer interoperability that people love Apple products more.

[@nickwallette6201]

@@すどにむ What proprietary port? SCSI was standard. IDE was standard. They used their own video and KB/mouse bus, but so did literally every other computer until everything became PCs.

[@FrankConforti]

Had it been given a chance for EVERY computer and peripheral to adhere to the first and second standards for SCSI it would still be in use today. Sorry if I sound like sour grapes here but I put a lot of effort into this standard, even going so far as setting up some pretty exotic configurations I wrote about in the early 90s. It wasn’t hard to do IF the vendors implemented it correctly. Before I finally gave up on Apple (my new job was all Microsoft) I’d have had it doing more.

[@TechTangents]

I have had some genuinely good experiences with SCSI as well, and some cooler projects with it planned eventually. I've just been trying some much more difficult and finiky hardware that has been making it more difficult to use. It would be nice to have the option to go to a store and grab all correctly compatible hardware in one go but it isn't easy to get that now.

[@massmike11]

SCSI for the amiga 600/1200 on a pcmcia card called the squirrel SCSI was a thing. I used one to run an apple cd300e on my amiga 1200

[@timballam3675]

I used to have one of those along with a USB adapter with about every possible adapter in my tool bag until the company I worked for went bust and I wasn't even allowed in to clear my desk or collect my tools! The receivers even wanted me to pay for my Cisco qualifications..... BTW SCSI is hot swapable is the adapter / software supports it!

[@bkahlerventer]

PCMCIA is based on PCI, IDE ATA protocol is based on scsi, except maybe really early implementations...

[@random007nadir]

There were also a dozen standards over the years. SCSI 1 was 8 bit. There was SCSI 2 and Fast SCSI 2. Wide SCSI was 16 bit with a different cable. We had Fast Wide SCSI 2 too. There was Ultra SCSI 3, Wide Ultra SCSI 3, Ultra 2 SCSI 3, and Wide Ultra 2 SCSI 3. Then Ultra 320, Ultra 640, and finally SAS.

[@jasonhowe1697]

scsi 33/66/100 I think was the standard regardless of stupid naming schemes the co's came up with..

[@davidchoi6068]

This is a great tools for a great Service Engineer. U can not imagine that I used Adaptec 1460 to repair an enterprise server GS with Optical juke box RW 5xx. The story is customer reported Juke box is off line. I on site in the afternoon. Then customer schedule midnight down time to repair. >>> SHOW DEVICE no juke box OD drives show on screen. I connected notebook w/ Adaptec 1460 and can scan four OD drives. Finally I saw a small black dot on the juke box SCSI cable. The cable is broken! I remembered that an Aircon technician walked in the computer hall. Most likely he kicked the ass of the Juke box and plugged it back as nothing is happened. Usually SCSI devices come with different cables. There are unused cable left behind. Ask customer to find one. Test OK. Boot up OK Call closed.

[@j2simpso]

Did you check the DIP switches on the side of the blue SCSI adaptor though? 🤔

[@oso2k]

Iomega Zip Drives had passthru parallel ports. SCSI was generally more reliable and didn't get out of sync when it did work.

[@kingneutron1]

LOL I got into SCSI at least 10 years too late (early 2000s IIRC) and had some old-ass double-height drives running with Linux before SATA was a thing, they were slightly better than IDE but less than 1TB. Also had a couple of SCSI CDROM drives for audio ripping. I remember seeing this exact peripheral on the tables at the swap meets.

[@MechWizzard]

I had a PCMCIA SCSI adapter for my Amiga 1200, it was called a squirrel.

[@UpLateGeek]

It just occurred to me that the Apple eMac has a PCMCIA card slot (or something very much like it) for the Airport card, so now I'm wondering if this could be made to work in an eMac. I do know some Powerbooks came with PC card slots, which some earlier models were PCMCIA, later models had cardbus slots, which I believe is supposed to be backwards compatible, but I don't know if that's the case in Apple machines. Anyway, if you've got any Macs with PCMCIA card slots, I'd definitely be curious if this works in them. No idea if Adaptec ever made any drivers for Mac, or if Apple supported the cards in Mac OS.

[@HeadsetGuy]

Unrelated to SCSI, but I saw you holding up a box for a Ditto Easy drive. I would _love_ to see a video about that at some point, since we had a Ditto drive on our family's computer growing up, but we gave it away, and when I bought another one on eBay new in box, it didn't work (the rubber wheel that's supposed to spin the wheel on the tape had turned to goo, so it was basically useless). Still, I find old tape technology to be extremely fascinating.

[@jasonhowe1697]

the original win 95 alpha had a lot of issues recognizing hardware, here in australia internet was so shit you would have to each cd revision in the mail or it wasn't until bravo and chalie revisions started adding support USB and Pcmia and so forth to the point we got 5 versions of 95 each with incremental update Noting that there was hit and miss pmcia standards with auto detection and driver install or addon via diskette/cdrom.. noting you will need to make sure all scsi devices are the same standard or will get compatibility in which has to be 1st in the chain as I believe there was 2-3 scsi device standards floating about sometimes the newer standard had to be in first position or the opposite coould also be functionally pending on the quirks of the scsi controller in use and what platform it was on and interface that was in use.. on pc internals you typically used long ribbon cables and less length cables as external media

[@alicebonnet4607]

So cool I used to dream about crappy laptops and scsi devices and pcmcia cards when I was a kid sadly had to settle with ide and parallel ports and serial like a primate.

[@georgeburgmeyer7274]

I will need to dig through some storage... but... if I can find the THREE Syquest carts I have somewhere, would you like them? I also have a couple internal Syquest drives... also "somewhere". ...and yes, Syquest drives are/were super cool.

[@deeiks12]

These adapters were used by photographers quite a lot for connecting scanners to laptops back then. I had one myself but I don't think it was by Adaptec.

[@tnoinetwork]

This is by far the greatest video ever!!! Does anyone have a full version of the Disk2File software?

[@matox162]

Now, i want to play with SCSI devices

[@RobertdeRooy]

For maximum fun, you should have set this up with DOS and Windows 3.1. DOS PCMCIA card manager services... yeah I had tons of SCSI equipment back in the day. HDD's, CD-ROM, Tape, Flatbed Scanner, Iomega and Syquest drives. Ohh the fun... Having a good controller (Adaptec!) was crucial.

[@EssenceofPureFlavor]

Always found SCSI extremely interesting, despite never owning or using any SCSI products. Thanks for showing it off!

[@dwaynezilla]

I imagine that a non-negligible amount of people thought "ok good he's talking about terminators" as a sort of SCSI PTSD

[@goodasdead4303]

Yes, there was a market, and still is, around individual item storage. PCMCIA is not exempt from this.

[@needfuldoer4531]

[Laughs in PowerBook] I don't know if it's some kind of Apple magic or what, but I don't remember ever having weird SCSI difficulties. SCSI Disk Mode was a trip, though.

[@joetheman74]

Plug and Play does not mean you don't need a driver. It just means there are no jumpers to set and you don't need to go into software and set a bunch of ports and addresses.

[@jengelenm]

Very cool project!

[@FVDaudio]

That days... ☕✨

[@sbrazenor2]

I never really had any trouble with SCSI. That being said, my experience was mostly associated with using it with Macs, and in some cases you needed an extension, but once loaded it would work flawlessly. As a technician I had SCSI drives setup with diagnostics and I was able to always get them booted without issue. I'm not sure why you make it seem like SCSI is the devil or something. 🤣

[@dwaynezilla]

>> "whoa that's a lot of port types" > yeah that's just the physical connector, I haven't even begun on the interface! What a "standard," lol

[@ChrisMcDonough]

Was about to be "that guy" and say "centronics connectors are like that but 36 pin" and then I looked it up and I'll be damned they are called 50 pin centronics connectors! TIL.

[@bobblum5973]

Technically they are "ribbon" connectors because of the shape of the contacts, the 36-pin ones were used on Centronics printers where the parallel printer interface originated. The 50-pin ones were also used by telephone systems for multiple line interconnects. Of course calling them "ribbon" connectors is confusing because of all the connectors used on ribbon cables; but those should be called flat cables... (🤯 Don't you just love standards? And nicknames? 😁)

[@der.Schtefan]

Did it take 10 minutes or 10 hours to install?

[@maaaaandeh]

Is that a Win 98-like Explorer on Win 95?

[@DavidWonn]

The shell "upgrade" is the unfortunate result of adding IE4, which is far from advisable on a 486.

[@Artemis-zl5cs]

SCSI: What separates the true nerds from the rest of humanity

[@AnonyDave]

I'm pretty sure I'm just cynical due to having spent so much time around scsi, but not surprised most stuff just works. Watched this while installing solaris on a microsparc, from a CD image to a disk image both on the same sd card attached to a zuluscsi, finding out if the issues I had on another sparc box were a software bug (in my zuluscsi port) or just a configuration error 🤭

[@mikemoyercell]

I have a gateway Liberty dx2-50 (same laptop except yours is the dx4-100). Did you need to replace the CMOS battery on yours? What kind of battery did it take? Edit: The CMOS battery in mine took a charge after using it for like 24 hours. Now it doesn't loose any time so it must be some kind of rechargeable battery like the Gateway 2000 Handbook uses. Is there anyway you could share the file for that desktop background with me? I would really appreciate it. Mine came with the spcw256b (space cow) background. I would love to have this background on mine.

[@wilsondavenport6939]

so your telling me SCSI is the connector/format not the Wiring or version, hmmmm wonder if we are bound to repeat ourselves with usbc