Re: The full-blown Apple formula
SCSI had never been anything but problematic on the Mac
Have an upvote, because what you post is fairly spot on according to my fuzzy memory - except for the SCSI bit.
My memories are that generally SCSI was reliable and (for the day) very fast. There were issues around the time of the PowerPC introduction when the new SCSI subsystem software was buggy, but other than that I found it fairly reliable. The ability to daisy chain hard drives, scanners, printers, tape drives, and anything else you could actually afford to buy was great - at a time when PC users were messing around with crap like parallel port ZIP drives and the like (completely non-daisy-chainable).
Biggest issues were around the proliferation of SCSI standards and connectors, and just p**s-poor cables.
One complete and utter PITA I had was user inflicted - i.e. I should have said no. A (long standing and valuable IIRC) customer came along and wanted a SCSI cable for his portable. As I recall, the Apple portables used yet another cable with a more compact connector than the D25 used on the desktops until then. The other end of this cable had the wrong connector - I can't recall whether it had the 50 pin Amphenol or a D25 socket - and he wanted me to cut the wrong one off and fit the other type. Silly me accepted the challenge - and found rather more cores in the cable than expected, all of which needed to be ringed out and connected to the right pins in the new connector. I managed it though, and the customer was happy.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
