I dipped my spoon in the computer world's alphabet soup and came out with SCSI.
The acronym stands for small computer systems interface. Pronounced "scuzzy," it's a standard for connecting personal computers to peripheral devices and letting them talk to each other.What kind of devices? Scanners, Zip drives, hard disks, CD-ROM players, printers and so on.
There's also a new standard called SCSI2, which lets computers and devices transfer data back and forth faster.
Macintosh computers have a built-in SCSI port and you'll find a SCSI port on some PCs. If your PC doesn't have one, you'll have to place an internal card with a port in an expansion slot.
One SCSI port is all you need, though, because it's possible to daisy chain up to seven peripheral devices together.
Say you have a scanner and want to hook it up to your computer. You attach one end of the cable to the scanner and the other to the computer's SCSI port.
Then you run a second cable from the scanner to, say, a Zip drive and a cable from the Zip drive to a writable CD-ROM drive.
You can run the devices individually from the computer. Cool, huh?