tomb@tekecs.UUCP (02/28/85)
###### MUNCH ######## By now there'll be about 10 zillion responses to this but I'll add mine anyway. SASI: Shugart Associates System Interface The original! A proprietary bus structure dreamed up by Shugart Associates to allow intelligent disk interactions. Salient features include a 8 bit parallel asynchronus transfer and a moderatly high level command set. Strictly a single host : one device at a time bus. SCSI: Small Computer System Interface (ANSI X3T9.2) This is what happened when ANSI decided to "standardize" SASI. First they generalized the hardware protocol adding arbitration, deselect/reselect and allowing multiple hosts to exist on the bus. The timing changed a little but the signal definitions remained the same and in many systems you can use the hardware virtually interchangeably. They also added to the software protocols commands supporting removable or fixed random access devices (disks), sequential access devices (tapes), communication links, printers, ... SCSI is rapidly becoming the interface of choice for small system mass storage. e.g. most optical disk products are being introduced with SCSI. Small taape drives and Higher performance disks are tending tword SCSI. Even Xebec is moving away from SASI to SCSI. Their "OWL" drive is now available with SCSI interface. Hope this helps. Also hope it's not too redundant. Tom Beach email: ..!tektronix!tekecs!tomb -- Tom Beach email: ..tektronix!tekecs!tomb
spiros@clan.UUCP (Spiros Boucouris) (03/07/85)
Recently there have been several explanations of the above acronyms. I hereby make a request for the specifications or pointers to them of the above standards. Thanks in advance. S.B.