Well, I've seen a few parallel ports that lost
their magic smoke after an
external SCSI zip drive was plugged into them. I'd have to say it at least
isn't safe to mix up parallel and scsi ports...
I know the Mac SE will survive having its SCSI port connected to a
parallel printer. Although the Mac will not boot unil the cable is
removed (it will sit with a flashing ? as the printer will confuse it,
and it will fail to check the SCSI chain for a boot device).
I know this because I had a location do just this... and then bitch that
the Mac was dead (and then ship it to me FedEx P1 to fix... costing the
company about 10 times the value of the Mac in shipping charges).
They left everything connected (literally, they just took a big box,
dropped the printer in it, then dropped the SE on top, followed by the
keyboard and mouse... leaving ALL cables still interconnected!).
One look at the printer cable and I knew what the problem was that was
keeping the Mac from booting... I wasn't very surprised the office staff
had done this... but I WAS very surprised to see the Mac boot fine as
soon as I removed the parallel cable... I had figured they fried the SCSI
bus.
-chris
<http://www.mythtech.net>