Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!apple!mailcom!postmaster
From: postmaster@mailcom.FIDONET.ORG (Bernard Aboba)
Newsgroups: sci.electronics
Subject: SCSI Bus incompatibilities
Message-ID: <2793.23E998ED@mailcom.FIDONET.ORG>
Date: 2 Feb 89 22:56:28 GMT
Organization: MailCom Public USENET, Palo Alto CA (415) 855-9548
Lines: 17

As a Mac user, I've become very enamored of the SCSI bus.  In particular, 
I like the ability to attach (and easily remove) hard drives, and other 
devices from the bus, and trasport them to other computers.  
Now I'm looking into getting a SCSI controller for my PC.  I thought that 
this would make it possible to attach Mac SCSI hard drives to the bus, 
assuming that I could reformat the drives for the PC. As I thought that 
all SCSI peripherals were supposed to have an embedded controller, they 
should be interchangeable among computers, only requiring reformatting.
 
I am now told that this isn't the case, because very few manufacturers 
actually implement the full SCSI standard.  Therefore the embedded SCSI 
controllers often don't or can't respond to the full SCSI command set.
 
Is there someone out there who can explain what commands Macs and PC's 
can and can't respond to, and can clear up this confusion?  As I 
understand it, no micros implement the device-device communications part 
of the SPEC.