HISTORY:
You might think, hell! it's just a PC cable but no .... it is a "slice of time" in the world of technology! It can be VERY difficult finding SCSI related devices and cables these days as they have largely been replaced by SATA and SAS
Sit back and let me tell you all about the history of this SCSI interconnect cable!
I ran an audio post production facility for 25 years and along the way we created solutions to our clients problems. Some were related to audio production and others pure IT data transfer facilities.
We are talking the late 1990's ~ early 2000's, it was a very different world in those days - Windows 98, XP & Server 2003 were the Microsoft platforms used, alongside Apple gear.
Actually my personal technical history goes a lot further back in time, in the 1980's remember S100 buss industrial machines (some were made here in Seven Hills, Sydney), PDP-11's, VAX servers from Digital Equipment Corporation, 8 Inch Floppy Drives (those were REALLY FLOPPY! and 5.25" had not been released yet!), DOS in it's many, many variants (not only Microsoft produced "DOS"), the Basic programming language and who could forget Windows 2.0/2.11/3.0/3.1 (Urghhhh)
Motherboards sported ISA buss slots with perhaps some of the "new" ubeaut PCI stuff if you could afford it. Most interfacing to peripherals such as hard drives was via IDE but for faster throughput, SCSI was the way to go. SCSI eventually became available in three "types", SCSI-3 having the highest throughput.
For this reason we ran all of our machines using SCSI-3 exclusively for hard drive data transfers, this is the special cable interconnecting those hard drives to the Adaptec SCSI-3 interface cards. Back in the day (early 2000's) a 9Gb SCSI drive was massive storage capacity and this machine had two of them! One for programs and the other drive exclusively for music transfer from DAT and storage.
The big STEEL cased cabinet you see pictured was originally a custom made CD duplication machine imported from Trace Duplication (USA). We upgraded that box to a wonderful (most of the time) fully automatic CD media 6 arm robotic machine which was a wonder to behold, while it worked correctly! Sometimes it would lose track of what it was doing and would pickup CDr media for writing and then the robot would start throwing the CDr's around the room like frisbies! Funny (the joke was that the machine was having some "down time", playing frisbies instead of working) but serious at the same time, that was clients music flying all around the duplication room!
Over time, the large PC unit had a myriad of extra SCSI peripherals connected to it so that we could easily take data from many different sources for straight transfer to other media or conversion and even some copy protected decryption at times. That is why you can see various CD drives and the ZIP drive in the front and other external DLT and assorted tape drives would "hang off" the SCSI buss accessed from the rear of the unit.
My wordee this is now VERY OLD technology and I see no point in keeping this unit complete so I am parting out the various components that may be of interest to others - not generally for the home computer user but some specialised industrial machines still use the SCSI-3 architecture.
Yes, I will not leave you stranded with just the SCSI-3 cable! I also have a spare Adaptec 29160 card and a couple of nice internal SCSI-3 9Gb hard drives
To see these other items, click HERE
So, after that long introduction, let's get down to describing this component ....
TEKRAM - SCSI Interface Cable
Made by Amphenol
68 pin high density male D connectors (they will only plug in "one way")
Twisted flat cable between each port
Primary port connectors to your SCSI-3 interface card
Peripheral ports, of which there are 4, connected to each SCSI-3 device - usually hard drives but other peripherals also used SCSI-3 communications
SCSI-3 LVD/SE terminator plugs into an extra "far end" port of the cable
DIMENSIONS:
Cable total length is 115cm end to end
Primary port (plugs into the card) to the 1st peripheral port: 40cm
Each subsequent peripheral port is 23cm distant from the next port
Two ports still have the dust covers (light blue) fitted to the connectors as we didn't use them
CONDITION:
USED
CLEAN
Known to be fully functional prior to removal from the machine described above (you can see the cable "in-situ" in one of the photographs
The cable has a light plastic "covering" over the twisted pair sections, this has become brittle and although still in "one piece", some side wires have separated from the "main twist" - this is not a big deal and did not affect the machine operations.
Connectors and the male contacts are clean, shiny
Now that I have completed this description and taken a photograph, this cable has been neatly folded and is sealed in a clear plastic packet to protect it
