Any other way, we were told, could lead to Certain Death, or at least the destruction of the data on our SCSI drives. Want to disconnect? Shut down, power down the drive, and disconnect. If you wanted to connect a SCSI hard drive to a Mac back then, you were supposed to shut down your Mac entirely, then plug in the drive, power it on, and boot the Mac back up. This is called hot plugging, and it was very much not allowed in the SCSI era. When you're done, you eject any mounted volumes and unplug. But in the end, you plug a cable into the Mac and the thing attaches. If there are wires at all, they're probably USB or USB-C or Thunderbolt (which is sometimes shaped like USB-C) or maybe lightning. And this is when I am reminded of the horror of SCSI, and how happy we all were to see its back when the iMac brought USB onto the scene in 1998.Ĭonsider how we all connect hard drives and other peripherals to our Macs today. So I set about trying to see if I could figure out what was on it. Since the person who sent it to me no longer had a Mac with a SCSI port, he asked me to send him any stray files that I found on it.Ī decade passes, and I'm finally spending some time getting a couple of old Macs working when I find that SCSI drive, which I have never connected to anything.

Pronounced scuzzy, it was the high-speed peripheral connection standard for the Mac for most of its first decade, used primarily for hard drives but also by scanners and all sorts of high-end hardware.) I apparently agreed, thinking I might get around to attaching it to an old Mac Plus I had laying around my house.

Hot pluggingĪ decade or more ago, I got an email from someone I knew saying that he had an old SCSI drive, and did I want it? (For those of you who don't know what SCSI is, get off my lawn. You remember the good times, but forget the bad! As someone who recently had to figure out how to boot a SCSI drive, let me tell you how good we've got it. Within five feet of me as I write this are a working G4 Cube, G4 iMac, Mac Plus, PowerBook 170, and even a Power Computing Mac clone.Īs much as using old computers can be a fun nostalgia trip, it also makes me appreciate what we have today all the more. Over the last few years, I've spent a little time buying a few old Mac models and getting them up to speed.

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