QNIVERTER - Unibus to Qbus conversion for VAX migration

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Qniverter ^TM
Q-bus to Unibus Conversion
for VAX 3000 and 4000 series

In the application shown below, a major oil company upgrades from Unibus based VAX's to a VAX series 4000. A specialized Honeywell controller that is only available on the Unibus was a critical element of the system operation.

PROBLEM: Upgrade to the VAX 4000 series while still being able to use the Honeywell Unibus controller. Hopefully without impact to software.

SOLUTION: The ABLE Qniverter allows up to 19 Unibus devices (loads) to be added to the VAX series 3000 and 4000 without special software.

It's as simple as installing the Qniverter board into the VAX 4000 chassis. Plug in a standard Unibus expansion cable into the connectors in the cutout of the Qniverter and running them to the expansion chassis and plugging the other end into slot A & B of the first slot of the Unibus Backplane.

The unibus cable is installed in the A&B slot of the first position of a backplane. The last slot is used to either jumper to the next backplane or terminate the bus with a terminator board. I/O boards are either Quad (4 connector) or Hex (6 connector) width. They obtain their signal lines from columns c,d,e,f, using column c to daisychain NPG grant and d to daisychain BG grants.

The drivers for the boards being moved to the VAX 4000 platform from the older VAX should move without incident. The only time a problem may occur is when their is a similar Q-bus device sharing the same driver. In this case, a minor patch may be required to force it to take the 18bit device path in the driver.

There are thousands of Qniverters installed all over the world in applications such as this that the alternatives would be very costly. In this case, the customer improved performance and lowered maintenance cost to the point that the savings would pay for the hardware quickly.

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