Nintendo Wii U games running from a 1980's Bernoulli disk [video] (opens in new tab)

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.

[0] https://bluescsi.com/

SCSI was that thing your dad's workstation had at work, and the rich kid had on his Mac.

I remember finding some older Adaptec cards for an early Linux box and they were still worth some change, even 5+ years old.

As far as I understand it in retrospect (having grown up in a strictly PC household and later investigating "retro" platforms where SCSI was standard), SCSI was not inherently expensive. It's more that for PC platforms, ATA provided a hack that was cheaper at the time, which led to a bifucation of the market. ATA roughly turned HDDs into a subset of the ISA bus, which in turn originated as a buffered version of the CPU bus. That led to SCSI being at a premium on PC platforms because the target market was limited to customers for whom ATA wasn't good enough (mainly because they wanted more drives or longer cables than the thin translations of ATA could support).

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.

SCSI my old friend!

Much of the black magic art of Mac support back in the 80s and 90s was getting SCSI chains sorted out!

Sorting out the device order, swapping out cables, that sort of thing.

I once spoke to a client who said they’d been happily running a single external SCSI drive hooked up to two Macs at the same time….

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.

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 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.

Computing was insanely expensive back then.

Pay the tax of - reliability problems, ever one came with a cable, where is the termination, each had power, need another power strip...etc, etc, etc.

as well, as Wide SCSI, so all your 50 pin stuff needed to get upgraded to 68pin...

Bernoulli... ultra reliable. Zip? Clock was ticking on the click of death. Bernoullis were not the fastest, but they were the quietest and most reliable.

And yet practically every Mac after 1986 had SCSI onboard. Why the PC industry didn't embrace it to avoid having to wait until USB is beyond me...

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.

It was very common, or at least made out to be.

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)

I used Zip disks extensively for audio and graphics work. Almost all the drives I encountered died after a while.

It was a design issue.

Magneto Optical discs were also somewhat popular in this era.

When the Wii came out was also really close to when the Ouya released as well. It was funny to see that a tablet/phone processor (Tegra 3) had a more powerful CPU than the Wii U, it was only lacking in the GPU department. But you could easily see that gap closing quickly.

But it sort of became obvious, the Wii U gamepad was just waiting for powerful enough mobile technology so that it could break free of the console. And then the Switch happened and I was so glad that Nintendo didn't miss this opportunity.

Have you tried Dolphin? From what I understand it's the best in class emulator on that front.