Paul G. Allen wrote:
It's unfortunate that the industry mangled what SCSI was designed for.
It was not designed just for connecting scanners and hard drives to a
computer. It was designed to connect *any* device with a SCSI interface
to a common system bus. The SCSI bus was designed to allow multiple
hosts and every device could become a host or a slave. In 1988 I
designed a video system (while I still worked at NCR, the folks that
brought us SCSI, but it was not done for NCR) that had a SCSI interface
on board so that it could load video data directly from disk, bypassing
the host computer. Such a system would have a minimum of two hosts - the
host computer and the video system - and multiple slaves.
To this day I'd still like to see video systems with smart peripheral
interfaces on them. It would greatly speed up system performance.
What happened with Firewire? I thought Firewire could support multiple
host/slave interactions on one bus.
Of course, that's why the device manufacturers like USB. They can make
the devices stupid and force the host computer to expend all the effort.
-a
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