[XCSSA] USB->SCSI adaptors

[xcssa@xcssa.org]

On Feb 17, 2007, at 8:10 AM, xcssa-admin@xcssa.org wrote:

> I've encountered something similar with Apple & third party driver  
> support...
> Three years ago, my mom upgraded her old G3 from OS9 on to OSX.   
> The previous
> year I had bought her a rather nice 2400DPI Epson USB scanner... After
> upgrading to OSX, the Mac wouldn't recognize it any longer and Mac  
> & Epson
> support both told her that she needed to upgrade to a newer version  
> of the
> scanner(?!?!)...  For a while, she was actually dual booting Mac  
> OS9 and OSX
> just so that she could still use it.  Now given her last OSX  
> install, the
> scanner is now effectively a door stop.
>
> Why does Apple and third party driver writers have such a short  
> support
> lifecycle with OSX driver support?  I mean she had it literally for  
> less than
> a year!

So you're saying it was Apple's fault that Epson didn't want to write  
new drivers for what was esentially a completely new operating  
system?  For what it's worth, it probably still would have worked  
under Classic.  I've had better luck with Canon supporting scanners  
that came out at the dawn of the OS X era (I eventually found an OS X  
Photoshop driver for my LiDE 20).

But you can't say that there weren't exactly the same kinds of  
problems with the Windows 98 to 2000 switchover.  It even got to the  
point where the Goodwill computer store didn't want to sell old  
scanners and inkjet printers because of the lack of driver support  
for older equipment to run on current operating systems.

It's just easier to write drivers for non-protected-mode operating  
systems like Windows 95/98/ME and the old MacOS, as opposed to OS X  
and 2K/XP/Vista.  Doubly so when you've already written them and are  
just in maintenance mode.  The hardware manufacturers were simply  
dragging their feet and acting as though the problem would go away if  
they ignored it long enough.  And then when they finally did write  
new drivers, they made little or no effort to back-port for the older  
equipment.

  - Bruce -