Webster WQSMD/04 Qbus SMD Controller

[Huw Davies]

> On 13 Dec 2015, at 18:40, Robert Jarratt <robert.jarratt at ntlworld.com> 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?

Webster were based in Melbourne Australia and developed a lot of innovative products in the 1980s/1990s. We had one such controller in a MicroVAX-II I used to manage with a Fujitsu Super Eagle SMD drive. It was a very cost effective solution compared with an RA-82. 

I hadn’t thought about this particular system for a long while and it brought back fond memories. The fact that  I still manage OpenVMS systems 30 years later is cause for celebration!

Huw Davies           | e-mail: Huw.Davies at kerberos.davies.net.au
Melbourne            | "If soccer was meant to be played in the
Australia            | air, the sky would be painted green"