I have a real soft spot in my heart for SCSI. I'm one of those crazy PC people who tried to use it, paid the "tax", and didn't necessarily come out ahead for it.

SCSI is a beautiful example of abstraction and standardization getting is Cool Stuff decades later. While there certainly are edge cases and it's not as 'tidy' as I'm making it out, it's really neat to me that a device like the BlueSCSI[0] can come along and bring a healthy dose of modernity to old platforms.

SCSI is at a sweet spot of general purpose capability and abstraction from the hardware (unlike, say, the Shugart floppy interface, or even ATAPI/IDE) that allows devices to be built to just plug-in and provide significant functionality to legacy platforms.

[0] https://bluescsi.com/

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.

And yet practically every Mac after 1986 had SCSI onboard. Why the PC industry didn't embrace it to avoid having to wait until USB is beyond me...

I would read these beautifully designed computer mags made for Mac people in creative areas in like 1987-1989 (like the Swedish Macworld). They routinely reviewed peripherals like SCSI scanners, hard drives etc costing like $10-25k (not inflation adjusted, so 2x those numbers). Crazy.

Computing was insanely expensive back then.

I used my paper route money to add storage to my Mac 660AV.

My options were a SCSI hard disk, SyQuest or a Zip drive. I went with the latter. Since it was SCSI it wasn't appreciably slower than the internal HDD so I had a disk with MS Office installed, disk with all my games, etc that I'd swap out for what I was doing.

I was happy with my choice a year later when SyQuest had gone out of business and I had 4x as much storage as I would have had with just buying a hard disk.

Three years later I suffered the click of death and I was less happy. I used some hack I read on Usenet about cutting off the outer 1mm rim of the disk with nail scissors which let me rescue my data.

I used Zip disks extensively for audio and graphics work. Almost all the drives I encountered died after a while.

It was a design issue.

The only true "click of death" involved physically damaged disks. It was possible for a damaged disk to also damage any drive it was inserted in. Outside of that, the "click of death" was really just the drive retracting and reinserting the head on a read error.

I experienced click of death using my zip disks at a school lab.

The disk breaks the drive, drive breaks the disk spiral made communal drives rapidly not an option. There was a utility available that I used to fix my disk, but then I only used my disks in my drive after that experience.

It was very common, or at least made out to be.

I never had it happen either, but I used SyQuest drives more, and then moved to CD-R (which was the real click of death for Zip disks)

Have you tried Dolphin? From what I understand it's the best in class emulator on that front.