Re: Help with Zip Drive and the IIgs

[toddpw@ugcs.caltech.edu (Todd P. Whitesel)]

nathan@visi.com (Nathan Mates) writes:

>   That you've been using a Mac explains this preocupation with
>drivers.  Just because Apple (stupidly in my opinion) required drivers
>for every SCSI disk on a Mac doesn't mean that other computers dodn't
>behave much saner. [Standardized things like SCSI disks should have
>*optional* drivers if the maker wants, in my opinion]

Back when Apple made that decision, SCSI was not nearly the standard it is
now. Have you _read_ the SCSI spec? I bought a copy. Based on its contents
you would not have been able to write a "standard" driver for:

    anything removable (CD, floppy, cartridge, etc.) if you wanted "eject"
    anything that was not a disk or tape (scanner, ethernet, printer)
    partitions (those were never part of the SCSI standards)

Apple's decision to educate everyone about custom drivers helped the Mac a
lot, because SCSI kicked the PC's parallel port and the Mac developers didn't
have to wait for Apple or the ANSI SCSI committee to define extensions to
the standard. After the "extensions" to SCSI settled down, a whole bunch
of them were ratified as the "Common Command Set" or CCS. The ANSIfication
of that was part of SCSI-II.

About then was when Sculley's desire for common peripherals across all of
Apple's existing product lines pushed the Apple II SCSI card into existence.
By then it was possible to consider generic standards. But there were still
some problems; the early RamFAST could not handle removables at all -- over
on GEnie, Drew Vogan at CVT dragged his feet so much on support for the
floptical, I eventually had to quote in public from the developers'
information I got from the makers of the first floptical (InSite, who
licensed it to IOmega, who did a much better job of productizing it), so
Drew no longer had the excuse that he couldn't get info on the SCSI vendor
specific commands.

The RamFAST went through _many_ ROM revisions trying to get floptical support
right. The first ROM I got ejected the disk without waiting for the write
buffer to be flushed; if you copied or moved a file and immediately dragged
the disk to the trash, it popped right out but some of the modified directory
blocks were never written to the disk (AIEEEE!!). It didn't help that when I
reported this bug Drew called it a "user headspace problem" because I was
supposed to wait for the light to flash before telling finder to eject it.
By this time I had written several small hacks that knew how to eject floppies
automatically (remember GS DiskImage?) so Drew eventually came around.

A pleasant side effect of this arm-twisting was that it opened a door into
the RamFAST firmware for Tape drive support and some sort of generic SCSI
command interface which I think you had to call smartport to get at. Apple
had a real SCSI driver structure, but with all the DMA SCSI specific stuff
in it, there was never any real hope of the RamFAST providing a supervisory
GS/OS driver that would "just work" with the various Apple SCSI drivers.
(BTW there was an AppleScan GS with SCSI driver for the scanner, yet another
victim of Apple II project infanticide. I saw it in summer of 1990.)

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ ugcs.caltech.edu