14 Dec
2015
14 Dec
'15
8:46 a.m.
On 2015-12-13 1:40 AM, Robert Jarratt wrote:
I picked up some Qbus cards yesterday. They seem to be
board set for a
MicroVAX II. However, one of the cards was, to me at least, a bit unusual.
It was made by a company called Webster, and it appears to be a controller
for SMD disks. I was not familiar with SMD disks and had to look them up. I
suspect this might be a little out of the ordinary, and, possibly, an odd
combination for a small Qbus system to access such a physically large type
of disk. Were MicroVAX IIs used much with such disks? Is this a bit of an
unusual find?
Not completely unusual. Our company had a pair of Microvax IIs, in rack
mount form, that shared a pair of SMD drives in another rack mount
chassis. The cards used to interface to the 8" drives were EMULEX QD33
MSCP-compatible SMD/SMD-E disk controllers. I would have one of these up
and running right now, except that the power supply in the drive chassis
died the last time I tried it and haven't had time to fix it. I believe
the drives are from fujitsu. I believe the drives were mainly used as
NFS mounts for other UNIX boxes.
-Jon