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Comment by mgiampapa | Hacker News Reader

While impressive, it would have been a lot easier to just use a SCSI connected Ethernet adapter. Correct SCSI termination would have required sacrificing a chicken and drawing a pentagram in blood, but still easier than this project.

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Eh... I had many, many battles with parallel SCSI. However, once active terminators became widely available and affordable (late 90s-ish) it was practically plug&play (just mind the ID switches)

The trickier bit would be to find one of those old SCSI-attached ethernet devices (Asanté, DaynaPort, EtherMac, ...) since they're coveted items in the retro scene. Although it looks like at least PiSCSI can emulate a DaynaPort https://github.com/PiSCSI/piscsi/wiki/Dayna-Port-SCSI-Link

Yeah, but when you get that termination working, you get to turn to the 4th wall and shout, "It's alive! Alive! Oh, now I know what it feels like to be Woz!"

I never had those issues with SCSI. By 1996 I had a Zip drive, a Jaz drive, an external CDROM drive and two external hard drives connected to my PPC 6100 without issues.

Pure luck. Seriously. I wished I could get back all the hours I spent tracking down termination issues. And don't get me started on 10base-T.

10base-T or 2? I had ongoing nightmares with the latter, BBN R&D used it extensively and we’d have entire network segments flood with noise when someone bumped an AppleTalk repeater in the data closet.

Well, to be fair I was thinking of repeaters and hubs before switched became the norm, but now that you mention it, I do have a couple of horror stories regarding 10base2 as well. In particular, to stay 'on topic' regarding termination, or lack thereof. And those neat insulation piercing taps :(

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