I was there when the old magic was written.

What a lot of PC history fails to capture is that SCSI was not ubiquitous. It was a “luxury” feature that you had to seek out for yourself as an add-on PCI card, and off-the-shelf consumer PCs did not come with these installed.

SCSI peripherals came with a premium as well, so committing to SCSI meant consistently shelling out more with each upgrade.

For example, in the mid-1990s, parallel port ZIP drives were the cheapest option for external “large volume” storage. An ATAPI internal or external SCSI ZIP drive had price differences that were significant enough to make you think twice about the value of your purchase.

Edit: As an aside, the parallel port could act as dollar-store SCSI with daisy-chaining. We had the ZIP drive in line with a Pinnacle Studio 400, that terminated on an HP Deskjet 890Cxi (… for Windows) printer. It was a painful line-by-line experience trying to print, while doing a data transfer to/from the ZIP drive.

These things are really hard to find nowadays! When they came out, most PCs did not even have a hard drive, and those that did typically only had a 5MB or 10MB unit. The Bernoulli cartridge stored 10MB (later 20MB) and you got two drives in a single enclosure! With the optional boot ROM installed on the host adapter card (an odd version SCSI that was closer to the predecessor, SASI) you could boot your OS off one drive and put data on the second disk. The biggest disadvantage was that it was slower than a regular hard drive.

Hacks, on hacker news. I love it.

Before usb sticks, zip disk was the only way to move medium to large files, other than burn a cd.