On 10/02/2017 01:46 AM, Alan Perry via cctech wrote:
There was a call to form the CAM (Common Access Method) Committee of X3T9.2 (SCSI-2) on 30 Sept 1988 and they first met on 19 Oct 1988. The primary goal was to come up with a SCSI subset to facilitate it support in multiple OSs and BIOS on PCs. At the first meeting, two items mentioned in the minutes seem relevant. 1. Jim McGrath of Quantum was interested in embedding SCSI in the drive without a physical SCSI bus and described problems with reference to the PC/AT.
Does anyone know why IDE/ATA even came about? I mean, why SCSI wasn't used? It would have been an established standard by then, the drive complexity seems comparable to IDE/ATA (i.e. intelligent commands over a parallel bus), and SCSI controllers can be extremely simple - just a handful of LS logic ICs - unless you want to add loads of command queuing and such (again, comparable to IDE)
Did it simply come down to pressure from vendors, wanting to distinguish between expensive workstation-class drives and something cheaper which could be associated with the lowly PC?
cheers Jules
