> Like many external drives in the 1980s and 90s, [Bernoulli] used a high-speed connection called SCSI. With SCSI…

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.

• jervant

  today at 6:27 PM

  And yet practically every Mac after 1986 had SCSI onboard. Why the PC industry didn't embrace it to avoid having to wait until USB is beyond me...

• bombcar

  today at 5:47 PM

  SCSI was that thing your dad's workstation had at work, and the rich kid had on his Mac.

  I remember finding some older Adaptec cards for an early Linux box and they were still worth some change, even 5+ years old.

  • Grazester

    today at 6:16 PM

    When I was in highschool in the later 90's I had an acquaintance that did graphic arts. He of course had a Mac with scsi everything, zip drive,scanner and printer.

    It was cool and fascinating to me that only knew of the newly released USB, serial and parallel ports for external devices.

• lysace

  today at 5:48 PM

  I would read these beautifully designed computer mags made for Mac people in creative areas in like 1987-1989 (like the Swedish Macworld). They routinely reviewed peripherals like SCSI scanners, hard drives etc costing like $10-25k (not inflation adjusted, so 2x those numbers). Crazy.

  Computing was insanely expensive back then.

I used zip disks quite a bit (as an architect) and never heard the click of death.

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

• smilespray

  today at 6:11 PM

  I used Zip disks extensively for audio and graphics work. Almost all the drives I encountered died after a while.

  It was a design issue.

• kalleboo

  today at 5:29 PM

  I used my paper route money to add storage to my Mac 660AV.

  My options were a SCSI hard disk, SyQuest or a Zip drive. I went with the latter. Since it was SCSI it wasn't appreciably slower than the internal HDD so I had a disk with MS Office installed, disk with all my games, etc that I'd swap out for what I was doing.

  I was happy with my choice a year later when SyQuest had gone out of business and I had 4x as much storage as I would have had with just buying a hard disk.

  Three years later I suffered the click of death and I was less happy. I used some hack I read on Usenet about cutting off the outer 1mm rim of the disk with nail scissors which let me rescue my data.

• LocalH

  today at 5:01 PM

  The only true "click of death" involved physically damaged disks. It was possible for a damaged disk to also damage any drive it was inserted in. Outside of that, the "click of death" was really just the drive retracting and reinserting the head on a read error.

• toast0

  today at 5:10 PM

  I experienced click of death using my zip disks at a school lab.

  The disk breaks the drive, drive breaks the disk spiral made communal drives rapidly not an option. There was a utility available that I used to fix my disk, but then I only used my disks in my drive after that experience.

• bluedino

  today at 5:17 PM

  It was very common, or at least made out to be.

  I never had it happen either, but I used SyQuest drives more, and then moved to CD-R (which was the real click of death for Zip disks)

The Wii U walked so that the Switch could run. I'm glad to see renewed interest in it. Now if we only had a decent emulator. I know Cemu exists but the compatibility of most games I want to play with it is atrocious.

• wyantb

  today at 6:06 PM

  Have you tried Dolphin? From what I understand it's the best in class emulator on that front.

  • jedbrooke

    today at 6:23 PM

    Dolphin only supports Wii games, not Wii U. This is part of the reason the Wii U flopped is that people thought it was just a peripheral for the original Wii and not a separate new console.

    Dolphin is indeed fantastic for Wii/gamecube games though