Jerome Fine replies: I doubt very much that the answer is YES! Otherwise, it would have been easy to produce the 3rd party SCSI host adapters and there would have been a lot more competition - even with the $ US 100 license fee. Now I have heard of someone attempting to produce a Qbus controller for an IDE drive that would not even be MSCP - and probably put the IDE drive right on the controller - not that MSCP would be all that difficult in any case, but the primary objective was to keep the price as low as possible and avoid the $ US 100 license fee from DEC. The device would have looked like a very simple register driven hard disk drive that already has a device driver for one of the OSs in the PDP-11, not that a device driver for VMS could not also be produced in that case. I am not sure why it was never completed, but if it was that simple, I am sure it would have been done. There have been a large number of 3rd party Qbus boards from a few companies in the past. Did DEC discourage them - probably. Was it easy to design the boards. More than likely, but maybe the cost of fabrication was high or the volume too low. Hard to know why most - I think I know of just one left - are no longer in business producing Qbus boards. Of course, DEC was no longer producing many Qbus boards even before it became Qed. But there is still a thriving trade in old Qbus boards. I imagine that if it was so easy to produce them new, that some small company would come along and do so. After all, cars have knock off parts. But maybe, again, the volume is just too low. Sincerely yours, Jerome Fine