hyc@math.lsa.umich.edu (Howard Chu) (11/23/88)
I don't have the ANSI spec on SCSI handy, so here goes...
It's kind of surprising, when I think about it, but the only devices I see
for use with SCSI are storage units. Disk and tape drives... The EtherportSC
for the Mac may be the only exception I've seen.
What other devices are out there?
Has anyone ever experimented with attaching two host machines over a SCSI bus?
It doesn't seem like there should be anything to prevent this from working.
That'd allow memory to memory data transfers between any two computers. Or,
something less exotic, perhaps - two computers communicating by means of a
small buffer between them on the SCSI bus. (Like, a 512 byte "disk drive" -
computer A writes a block, computer B reads, etc...) Not the same as two
computers sharing a hard drive - I don't want to deal with that just yet.
But something along these lines would seem to be an ideal way to link two
machines together. Direct access to computer B's memory would be even more
interesting - could be the basis for a distributed operating system. (Who
needs transputers then, eh? A couple of STs running in parallel could be
all the compute power you'd ever need...)
I guess, a more specific question then, is - can you hook up an arbitrary
number of STs together via the DMA port or using SCSI?
--
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