> it really just killed off having to buy an extra host bus adapter card to send the same command set.
Sometimes that stuff could get pretty baroque. Back in the day I had a 20 MB HD for my Atari 8 bit computer, which involved an adapter from the Atari proprietary bus to SCSI/SASI, then a second adapter from SCSI to the MFM HD interface. You needed one of the custom DOSes to make use of it, as the standard Atari DOS had never envisioned things like hard drives.
We had a lot of SCSI devices in my house, and I think maybe like, 2 devices had the same connector. Even ZIP and JAZ, both by iomega, couldn't agree. The Atari ST in my place also has an ACSI connector, which is my guess, SCSI but yet more different somehow.
At that point I didn't even want plug'n'play or hotplug because getting something set up once was enough for you to never desire to change it.
I still have a huge crate of SCSI cables for my obsolete gear. Stuff like 25 pins to 50, 50 to 68, 68 to 80 pins, HVD and LVD cables with a bunch of various connectors, cables with integrated passive or active terminators, terminators that only terminate the high bits, cables with 3 connectors (yes, really) for devices with only one SCSI port, etc.
Like the old saying goes, "there are valid technical reasons that demand that you sacrifice a black goat here and there to your SCSI chain".
SCSI was the unobtainium of my childhood. There was one day where we had a borrowed SCSI card in the family computer for a Zip drive and a scanner and I felt like I lived in the future for a brief moment.
SCSI was definitely whizzy for its day, but man, was it ever finicky to get working and keep working. As a previous commenter noted, if you got a setup that worked you were reluctant to change anything.
Sometimes that stuff could get pretty baroque. Back in the day I had a 20 MB HD for my Atari 8 bit computer, which involved an adapter from the Atari proprietary bus to SCSI/SASI, then a second adapter from SCSI to the MFM HD interface. You needed one of the custom DOSes to make use of it, as the standard Atari DOS had never envisioned things like hard drives.