The original ADAT and the XT had different lock up times which mean it too a few seconds for them all to sync themselves together, but it only cause grief when you needed to go forward maybe 5 minutes, and then hitting play was a bit strange waiting for them to sync up and unmute. It's late 90s when I had 2 ADATs and one XT and they did the job rather well. The ADAT XT was a multitrack, so any combination from 1 to all 8 could be selected.

Long wait and not so high quality compared to basic audio interfaces available today. They were handy but a trouble to sync with the computer. I had an alesis adat in my first years of opening my studio. no need to delete the drum to add the guitar. The Daw will let you record every passes on seperate tracks. Now, today with a computer, you only need a 1 or 2 i/o audio interface and a DAW software (often one is comming with the unit). So you can go on and on but the thing is, with every generation, you loose quality to the playback being recorded over and over. Then I can playback the 3 and 4 which is bass and drum together and add a guitar and record the mix of it all to track 1 and 2 (at that time I'm erasing the drums that is alone but I have it mixed anyway in 3 and 4).Then I would playback the drum and play bass on top of it and record the result to track 3 and 4.I could record the drums in stereo using a mixer on 2 of the tracks of the recorder.The principal is that you always need an available track(s) to record new stuff in. Comping was a thing when we didn't have DAWs or recording units that can record a great amount of tracks.

Alesis adat 8 track