To try to make a long story short…
Our original, first generation SCSI tester product was being developed in the late 1980’s, as a “midnight engineering” project. We needed such a tester for my main disk drive distribution company, but that business kept us so busy we had to develop the tool a night, after normal hours.
Here’s an early prototype –
Sidebar: One of our first software products in the early 1980s was a customer/tape management product to computerize video tape rental stores – anyone remember those? Because of that we had a huge supply of movies on video tape, and something was always playing in the background while we worked.
Because we had several irons in the fire we needed a name for this SCSI tester product. One evening “Back to the Future” was playing in the background and I happened to be between thoughts when at the end of the movie Doc comes back to the future to pick up Marty to go into the future (Oct 21, 2015 to be precise). To refuel the time machine he dumped some garbage in the new “Mr. Fusion” power supply.
“Mr. Fusion”. For some reason that really tickled me.
Mr. Fusion.
Mr. Fusion…
Click! How about “Mr. SCSI”? The thought just snapped into place, one of those Eureka! moments.
Our tester had an internal name. Its officially marked name became the STM-100 –
Fast forward a few years. The hardware based Mr. SCSI tester had proven quite useful in our disk drive business. And as the ad shows we even sold it to other disk drive companies for testing and prepping drives.
But as with all hardware based products we had reached the end of what our original design could do.
So we decided to convert to a software based tester. In 2002 we left the disk drive distribution business and started a new company to do nothing but computer peripheral test and diagnostic tools – software tools this time.
This gave us so much more flexibility and power, we could adapt the product as technology evolved – it was just better all around. It was a much “smarter” solution.
So what should the smarter sibling or descendant of Mr. SCSI be known as?
That’s right – he was known as “Dr. SCSI”.
Dr. SCSI went on to have a car and a newsletter column –
And Oct 21, 2015?
That was the date that the time machine went to in “Back to the Future – Part 2”
Back to the Future day.
Mr. Fusion. Mr. SCSI. Dr. SCSI.
And that was the short version of the story – LOL!