Future Domain Corporation was a privately held American computer hardware company active from 1982 to 1995 and based in Orange County, California.
[4] Future Domain was one of the first SCSI host adapter manufacturers on the market, at a time when Adaptec and NCR had dominated the field as early pioneers.
Setting Future Domain apart from their competition was their emphasis on working with developers of device drivers and operating systems to ensure both software and hardware compatibility with their chips.
According to Allweiss, their competitors tended towards a hands-off approach, leaving vendors to write their own drivers and software compatible with their chips, despite the relative complexity of SCSI imposing a steep learning curve (especially in the late 1980s when the technology was still fresh).
Many vendors opted to package their wares with Future Domain's TMC-840 card, among their most inexpensive offerings but also antiquated and slow by the standards of the mid-1990s, owing to its 8-bit data path.
[17][18] It was lauded for its ease of use, with Jan Smith of Computer Shopper arguing that it "makes SCSI what the standard has always promised to be—a plug-and-play connection for a variety of PC peripherals".
[18] In 1994, Future Domain led a consortium of companies including Western Digital, Seagate, and Sony, to develop ATA Software Programming Interface (ATASPI; not to be confused with ATAPI), a proposed API specification for Windows that aimed to extend Windows' file system support for EIDE drives to include parallel tape drives.