Webster WQSMD/04 Qbus SMD Controller

[Jon Auringer]

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