The Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) standard (IBM developerWorks) [LWN.net]

Peter Seebach profiles the history of SCSI on IBM developerWorks. "Alan Shugart, founder of Shugart Associates and Seagate, gets most of the credit for being the visionary who realized the world needed a standard like this one. The initial protocol was called the "Shugart Associates Systems Interface," or SASI. It had a fairly limited set of protocol commands, and performance peaked out at 1.5 MBps (which sounds pretty weak, but for 1979 this was incredible)."

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Misses IP over SCSI

Posted May 27, 2005 4:41 UTC (Fri) by AJWM (guest, #15888) [Link]

Interesting historical summary, although I didn't see any mention of IP-over-SCSI (SCSI over TCP/IP, yes, but not vice versa). Back before gigabit Ethernet or Myrinet it was a hot research area for connecting clusters (even 100Mbit Ethernet is only about 10Mbyte/sec, horribly slow compared to fast wide SCSI, little better than SCSI-1).

I've always made sure my PCs had SCSI, one main reason so that I could share peripherals between them and my Macs. I remember back pre-USB days the nightmare of my father-in-law's PC with parallel port attached scanner, Iomega drive, printer, and a couple of other gadgets, with various (flaky) switches and through-plugs. (He never bothered to ask for my advice.)