12 Oct
2011
12 Oct
'11
3:17 a.m.
On 11/10/11 3:08 PM, Jules Richardson wrote:
The Sun 3 also had SCSI on the motherboard, and must predate the Plus,
but that's the workstation market - not a computer your grandmother, or
a non-technical small business owner might buy.
Tony Duell wrote:
>> Hmm, by what definition did they "first make the leap to SCSI"? Are
>> you comparing just against an IBM-compatible PC, or do you maybe mean
>> "first with on-board SCSI"? Or maybe "first with a machine
costing
>> less than $xxxx"?
>>
>> I'm just surprised, because there seemed to be a *lot* of systems
>> that were (or could be made so, if not out of the box) SCSI-capable
>> during the 80s.
>
> I would be very suprised if the Mac+ was the first computer to have a
> SCSI interface.
Nobody claimed it was.
The Mac+ uses
a stnadard single-chip SCSI cotnroller
(5380 IIRC), which was not designed to go into the Mac, or even to go
into a 68000 machine. It's a standard chip, off the shelf.
Thinking about it, Whitechapel's MG-1 had SCSI on the main PCB as
standard equipment, and that was in 1984, so a couple of years before
the Mac Plus.
The mono display was somewhere around the 1024x768 mark IIRC, and
although they were fully-fledged UNIX crates they were primarily
intended as single-user desktop machines.
Of course for the purposes of argument (umm, I mean discussion) maybe we
need to be limiting contenders to those selling within a few % of the
Mac Plus :-) (the MG-1 was pretty expensive, given the display
resolution, 32-bit CPU and memory expansion options)
From the outset I'm talking about the personal computer market, not
high end or workstations. The Plus was, iirc, something like AUD
$3,500-$4,000 - rather less in US$ at the time. And I could afford one
right out of high school, so it was easily affordable.
One could argue that in a sense SCSI was a "bad call" on the part of
Apple, since the volume market never took it up, but went ATA and SATA
instead, and Apple eventually had to follow suit. But certainly a good
diversity of quality SCSI peripherals were available to Mac users during
the years it was standard.
--Toby
cheers
Jules