Re: The real mystery is how Paula discovered the clock work around ...
... and a number of them would break when the termination error got fixed by someone trying to be helpful. :)
Based on what was described in the article, I'm going to suppose it was a very, very specific timing issue with the various I/O buses and the SCSI card.
SCSI was and still is considered voodoo if you are putting gear from different vendors on the same bus. Thankfully, we are largely past that in this modern day and age.