SCSI5034


The SCSI5034 board adapts the Synclavier D24 SCSI controller card (the oldest/most common versions, not the relatively rare D24/50 cards that came later) to standard 50-pin SCSI cables and standard 50-pin SCSI drives.

This, for example, makes the D24 SCSI-186 the exact functional equivalent of the D24/50-787, just by fitting the SCSI5034 on the card.

The SCSI5034 board also gives an advantage over any of the later D24/50 cards: It has proper a 50-pin ejector header on it, so that the very wide and tight fitting 50-pin cable connector can be easily pulled straight off the card without breaking or bending any pins (a D24/50 with completely straight pins has probably never been seen here). The D24/50 cards from NED always had the blue connectors with the stupid metal latches that are absolutely guaranteed to break off, and being metal and electrically conductive, aren't something good to have bouncing around loose inside a machine full of circuits. These new ejector headers don't break. This board is actually just a chip off the new Synclav.com D24/50-1014, which also has proper ejector headers.

The older D24
SCSI controller card uses a stupid 34-pin SCSI connection that wasn't standard to anything, ever. It was proprietary to NED and was never documented anywhere (and still isn't). There was never any such thing as 34-pin SCSI, and the use of it required adapters everywhere, even inside their own system, either SLSI boards (inside all NED ATS 80mb SCSI Winchester drives and inside the black box magic adapter unit that connected the optical drives to the system) or complicated and fragile adapter cables (which private techs made to avoid the cost of the black box). This was probably meant to confuse people and prevent them from buying disk drives, cables, etc. from computer stores.

In 1987, an ATS 80mb SCSI Winchester drive from NED was $7,500. This pricing wasn't exactly consistent with the rapidly falling computer hardware prices in the 1980s.

Cards with stupid non-standard pinouts were an important part of protecting this pricing scheme.


NED later gave up on this, the later D24/50 cards had standard 50-pin SCSI connections like everyt
hing else in the computer world, as did some external NED drives, though NED rarely used external hard drives or floppy drives after 1988.

The SCSI5034 is a small board that snaps onto a standard early D24 SCSI controller card:










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