Thought it was a licensing thing between MS and Adaptac that left it out
of W2K and XP? Or fact that Adaptec didn't have an updated version ready,
or combo of both?
It was a mess, political, not technical. One early factor was that ASPI
disks could bypass Microsoft security - ASPI could access the disk directly
anyplace it was told to, didnt bother with passwords, so Microsoft stopped
distributing Adaptec ASPI. But SCSI scanners simply couldnt work without
ASPI (however most of us still used Win98 that included ASPI). There were
other methods possible, and scanner drivers could have been rewritten, but
were not. Some did adopt STI for the buttons, but they largely werent SCSI
anymore. Adaptec sold ASPI with their EZ-SCSI package for their own SCSI
cards. A few scanners licensed and installed ASPI for W2K/XP (this didnt
conflict with Adaptec products). CD software was rewritten to be non-ASPI,
since Adaptec was marketing the EZCD software then, and wouldnt provide ASPI
for competitor CD software or other SCSI cards. Illegal patches were popular
to allow it to be installed in a non-Adaptec environment. A mess, conflicts
of proprietary standards.
This seemed tolerated during NT and W2K, which wasnt a mass market, but when
XP came out, then Joe User was affected. So about 4 months after XP
appeared, and after Adaptec disposed of EZCD, then ASPI 4.71 appeared, free
for all comers, officially blessed for XP by the powers that be. Earlier
versions worked, but were not blessed <g>
Microsoft publishes Knowledge Base Q300674 that says if you want your SCSI
scanner to work with XP, then install ASPI. But there were few SCSI
scanners left.
