In article ,
D Yuniskis wrote:

isw wrote:
In article ,
D Yuniskis wrote:

David Nebenzahl wrote:
So I made up a SCSI cable for the scanner I got off the street
(sigh) SayNoMore. SCSI cables need to have controlled impedances.
Even at ASYNC speeds, you can get all sorts of reflections that
can cause havoc.

Not always. I've seen (and owned) a number of SCSI peripherals hooked to
older Macs with no terminators and no problems. Strings up to three or

How old were the Macs? Were they using (ancient) 5380 SCSI HBA's?

Everything from the venerable Mac II to Blue & White G3s (well, not
*everything*, but a pretty good sample). Disk and tape drives (several
brands), scanners, film printers, couple of weird things I don't recall,
but *all* of it worked, with no terminators (well, just the one inside
the Mac). I just never had a problem, and after I found accidentally
that it worked, I'd hot-swap peripherals whenever I needed to -- just
make sure the disks were unmounted.

And then... Didn't change anything except to install OS X 10.3 on the
Blue & White, and the SCSI chain just vanished -- the Mac couldn't find
it at all. Stuck a terminator on the far end, and it all worked again.

Granted, my experience is with Macs, but in that context, in nearly 20
years, I never found SCSI to be very mysterious or tempermental, much
less felt the need to go looking for a goat...

Isaac