Nintendo Wii U games running from a 1980's Bernoulli disk [video] • Hacker News Board

Re: Nintendo Wii U games running from a 1980's Bernoulli disk [video]

#41

Post by wolvoleo » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 2:14 AM UTC

xattt wrote: post #8

> 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 prem…

Well it was standard on some computer systems. Macs as I remember, and most unix workstations. It was just not common in PCs but it was standard in more serious systems.

It spawned some higher speed versions like ultra wide scsi 3. And it's still used today in the form of serially attached scsi / SAS. And UASP over usb.

If anything the PC market was the odd one out. With first MFM/RLL and later IDE/ATA. Of course it didn't feel like that because that's what most of us had.

Re: Nintendo Wii U games running from a 1980's Bernoulli disk [video]

#42

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 7:33 AM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #9

xattt wrote: post #8

> 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 prem…

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.

[deleted]

Re: Nintendo Wii U games running from a 1980's Bernoulli disk [video]

#43

Post by deltarholamda » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 12:44 PM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #9

xattt wrote: post #8

> 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 prem…

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.

Back in the day you had to go dig up an Adaptec 1542 or something similar if you wanted a CD-ROM on your Linux box. IDE CD-ROMs were essentially unsupported.

Best part of SCSI was the required sorcery. "No no, young padawan, you must put the terminator on the scanner, not on the hard drive, lest your device chain causes the computer to no longer boot."

I had a film scanner that would not work on any other SCSI ID that was not 4. Why? Because. Alacazam!

Re: Nintendo Wii U games running from a 1980's Bernoulli disk [video]

#44

Post by bombcar » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 5:58 PM UTC

deltarholamda wrote: post #43

bombcar wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Back in the day you had to go dig up an Adaptec 1542 or something similar if you wanted a CD-ROM on your Linux box. IDE CD-ROMs were essentially unsupported. Best part of SCSI was the required sorcery. "No no, young padawan, you must put the terminator on the scanner, not on the hard drive, lest your device chain causes the computer to no longer boot." I had a film scanner that would not work on any other SCSI ID tha…

I can remember the day I switched to using Linux - the third coaster from the CD-burner that couldn't work under Windows 95 without dying, but Linux handled it fine while playing music if I reniced it.

Terminators - now there's something I'm glad are gone, it was always fun finding out that something "auto-terminated" to "help" you.