A Short Story about SCSI

Back in 1991, I had a lot of SCSI equipment for my Mac. SCSI was fast for the day, but it was also finicky. You could daisy chain devices, but the chain always had to end with a terminator.

I had two Syquest drives, which were 40 megabyte removable hard drives(!), an Apple flatbed scanner, and I think one other device. When you bought peripherals, they all came with cables, and of course Apple sold their own, very expensive cables.

Budgets were not endless so we used whatever we had, and usually the longer cables because it made positioning equipment easier. My setup at home was driven by a Mac IIcx, a true workhorse of a computer.

I would copy and backup documents between drives, but sometimes, the entire system would lock up. The only solution was a hard reboot, and in those days, a hard reboot was a huge problem due to file system corruption.

After some period of time, and a lot of data loss or time spent running Disk Warrior, I finally used our AppleLink account to contact Apple and ask DTS if they had any hints for how I could fix things. I was not expecting a response, but did I ever get a response!

This was around November and the engineer who wrote back asked if it would be ok to stop by my apartment over Christmas break, as they were visiting family in Los Angeles. I was amazed and of course I took them up on their generous offer.

There was a knock on the door, and sure enough, there was an engineer, carrying a couple of large bags. I welcomed them in and we went to my desk. They took a look and pretty much knew what the issue was, but wanted to run some tests.

They popped the lid off my IIcx and opened one of the bags. Inside was an oscilloscope! They connected the scope to the SCSI controller and asked me to try a few things. It did not take long before the bus flat lined, and we could see how noisy the bus was.

They suggested we replace all of my cables with Apple cables, which were shorter and much thicker in insulation and construction. We reconnected with the better cables and an Apple SCSI terminator. We ran tests for another hour. The system worked flawlessly!

They asked if it would be ok to give me these cables in exchange for my crappy cables so they could study why these cables caused the system so many problems. I gleefully accepted the offer, thanked the engineer and they were on their way.

This was some of the best Apple service that I had ever received, and I never bought cheap SCSI cables again.