ardent-blue
Experienced Member
- Joined
- Jan 2, 2015
- Messages
- 479
Folks, I was searching for "IP over SCSI" to see if there was any great developments, then I searched for SCSI communications or somesuch, and I found this:
Baytec 2000 which is different from what I was prepared for. There is pitifully little real information on this, so relying on period news releases and some digging for chip datasheets, I filled in a tiny bit of the big gulf of ignorance. It is an enclosure with 22 slots, I assume ISA, since they never mention them. Though it could be something else. This might be a backplane, with a system card, then up to eight SCSI controllers. Each SCSI controller has a cable to a "multimedia adapter" which actually is a device to support Co-Ax, Fiber, or Twisted Pair. Each SCSI controller can have 7 workstations on it. So each Baytec 2000 could have 8 SCSI controllers, each controller connected to 7 workstations, total of 56 workstations.
What Baytec did was to serialize the parallel SCSI and send it as serial data over a serial connection. The ad gush states up to 200 Mbits/second. So this doesn't seem to be SCSI as we expect it to be from this period [circa 1988], but a primitive form of SAS? Anyways, there was little need for drivers, with the implementation being SCSI. Mention was made that there was hardware support for some functions. What exactly, I dunno. SCSI-2 has support for printers, scanners, communication devices, tapes, whatever. Baytec -MIGHT- have been referring to the SCSI-2 support, and let the OS provide the driver support?
Anyways, it seems Baytec Inc. of Livonia MI went down prior to 1995, the firm's listing mentions "automatic dissolution", which I take as saying they let it lapse. Baytec Inc -MIGHT- live on as a Brand name used by someone else, but if Baytec still exists, in what form, I dunno.
Baytec 2000 which is different from what I was prepared for. There is pitifully little real information on this, so relying on period news releases and some digging for chip datasheets, I filled in a tiny bit of the big gulf of ignorance. It is an enclosure with 22 slots, I assume ISA, since they never mention them. Though it could be something else. This might be a backplane, with a system card, then up to eight SCSI controllers. Each SCSI controller has a cable to a "multimedia adapter" which actually is a device to support Co-Ax, Fiber, or Twisted Pair. Each SCSI controller can have 7 workstations on it. So each Baytec 2000 could have 8 SCSI controllers, each controller connected to 7 workstations, total of 56 workstations.
What Baytec did was to serialize the parallel SCSI and send it as serial data over a serial connection. The ad gush states up to 200 Mbits/second. So this doesn't seem to be SCSI as we expect it to be from this period [circa 1988], but a primitive form of SAS? Anyways, there was little need for drivers, with the implementation being SCSI. Mention was made that there was hardware support for some functions. What exactly, I dunno. SCSI-2 has support for printers, scanners, communication devices, tapes, whatever. Baytec -MIGHT- have been referring to the SCSI-2 support, and let the OS provide the driver support?
Anyways, it seems Baytec Inc. of Livonia MI went down prior to 1995, the firm's listing mentions "automatic dissolution", which I take as saying they let it lapse. Baytec Inc -MIGHT- live on as a Brand name used by someone else, but if Baytec still exists, in what form, I dunno.
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