Adaptec Corp has good news for those that have baulked at the prospect of all the complicated coding involved in installing a SCSI device. It has come up with a new EZ-SCSI disk for MS-DOS and Windows that does the work of three former packages combined: the ASW 1210 Advanced SCSI Programming Interface MS-DOS software manager; the ASW 1410 manager that provides support for up to seven SCSI devices; and the ASW 410 CD-ROM software module for MS-DOS. All you have to do to install the system in your personal computer once the disk is in place is type ‘a’ followed by ‘install’ and then follow a series of commands on-screen. The process takes around three minutes and can be repeated as and when users decide to add further peripherals to their existing repertoire. Adaptec is convinced that SCSI drives are the way forward for the ever-increasingly multi-functional personal computer environment offering much more than the traditional boost to memory capacity. A Small Computer Systems Interface connects diverse peripheral devices in a single board slot, offloading tasks that would otherwise have been performed by the central processing unit. IDE, its nearest rival, works in a similar way but, according to Adaptec’s UK sales manager Ray Castle, fails to offer comparable expandability – it can extend to only two peripheral devices as opposed to SCSI’s seven. CD-ROM is a particularly important growth area, not least because of the impending launch of Windows NT, solely on CD. At present only 7% of personal computers actually use SCSI drives – a figure that Adaptec is keen to increase. The 11 year-old company has established itself as something of a market leader, securing around a 75% share. It has generated $150m revenues so far this year, is expecting to make around $70.75m this quarter and has a target of $300m for 1992. That represents a 100% growth rate which is pretty good going in these recessionary times. The way forward, it believes is not expanding its share of the SCSI pie – but making the pie bigger – hence the arrival of this more accessible version.
