hackadaySettle an argument: was SCSI ever a "consumer" technology?
Chris Petrilli@hackaday absolutely. It was the definitive Mac hard drive and scanner connector for quite some time.
jarkman@petrillic @hackaday Agreed. I had a couple of SCSI scanners.
nothingfuture@hackaday I mean, yes? But also really no.
It was a standard and got used- but by a relatively tiny subset of people (compared to the general public). I’d say it’s a little like FireWire in that way (not a lot of consumer-level devices with it- and I know, early iPods used it, but those were before the device *really* blew up, and by then they’d gone usb).
It was a standard and got used- but by a relatively tiny subset of people (compared to the general public). I’d say it’s a little like FireWire in that way (not a lot of consumer-level devices with it- and I know, early iPods used it, but those were before the device *really* blew up, and by then they’d gone usb).
joy larkin 🌺✨Uhh, did you ever try to install a printer in the 1990s?
Jona Joachim
Bob
Michael Katzmann🐈@hackaday the SCSI legacy is the interface layer that is still used for USB drives.
Kyle Davis
zxm@hackaday high end consumers if you wanted a scanner, less high end consumers if you wanted high performance hard drives.
Alien software, human hardware@hackaday yes. Pro-sumer if you want to make that distinction.
You need to go back a while though :)
You need to go back a while though :)
Chris Burton@hackaday I'd say yes as there were plenty of SCSI scanners back in the day.
Chris Murphy@hackaday Several generations of Macs would say yes. Plus I had a TI ‘468-based laptop with a built in SCSI port.
prozacchiwawa@hackaday the reality is "almost". the scsi zip drive was probably the biggest thing anybody ever used scsi for, probably nothing else comes close.
@prozacchiwawa Very popular in the higher education sector.
Claudius@hackaday it was sold in any computer store. We had an SCSI connected flatbed scanner at home, because the alternative (parallel port) was unbelievably slow. And I think our first CD burner was also SCSI.
@claudius very much consumer then!
Kazriko@hackaday I'd say it was right on the edge, and was probably considered "High End" consumer tech. There were a handful of home prosumer computers (The higher-end Amiga 2000HD, and Stock Amiga 3000 to name a couple) that used it out of the box.
Robee? Na! 🌈@hackaday It felt ridiculously out of reach for PCs, and just plain expensive for Macs I had. Maybe prosumer level, like a DSLR.
Impossible Umbrella 
@hackaday Yes. Although with the caveat that the computer retail market then was much smaller and more technical than anything today. So 1980s “consumer” != 2025 “consumer”…
Jesse Kremer@hackaday pretty sure we had that connector for our PowerPC Mac’s scanner and potentially even was used earlier than that for our external CD drive for our Mac LCII or perhaps LCIII - can’t remember which we had exactly.
Hydrian@hackaday SCSI burners were good too. Back in the day when disc burns often failed due to the IDE bus underrun errors, the SCSi bus had much more fair distribution of the SCSI bus I/O. This caused much less failed burns. You could also use your machine while a burn was going on. When a single burn could take 20-30mins, this was a great advantage of SCSI.
Once SATA came along with NCQ, most of these advantages were lost.
This is how I got introduced to SCSI, but I was definitely a prosumer.
@hydrian definitely seemed more reliable back in the early days vs. IDE
Anton Piatek@hackaday Never knew anyone who had them. They were always business and pro priced
NoseyNick VA3NNW