Skip to content

Glossary

Three of the names in this project end in the same syllable, and several ordinary words — card, device, machine — mean something narrow here. This page fixes them.

QUniLatorThe software, and a running installation of it. It drives a DEC bus in real time and presents emulated hardware to the machine around it. Countable, because an installation has an address and a name of its own: two QUniLators on the same LAN.
UniBoneThe card that drives UNIBUS.
QBoneThe card that drives QBUS.
cardEither module, where the bus does not matter — a quad-height PCB that occupies a backplane slot and carries the BeagleBone.
BeagleBoneThe BeagleBone Black single-board computer the card carries, and the computer QUniLator runs on. Written in full.

Named by what each one is: QUniLator is what runs, the card is what plugs in, the BeagleBone is what it plugs into.

machineThe PDP-11, PDP-10 or VAX the card is fitted to — the computer around the card, never the card itself.
deviceOne piece of emulated DEC hardware: a controller, a drive, a terminal line, a block of memory, a bootstrap ROM. An RL11 is a device; so is each RL02 hanging off it.
widgetOne element of the web interface’s dashboard — the console, a drive’s status, the front panel.
configurationThe set of devices a machine carries, with their parameters: what QUniLator installs on the bus when the machine is switched on.
bundleA configuration packaged with its media as a .qcfg.zip, so a whole working machine travels as one file.
catalogueA published list of bundles that a QUniLator can subscribe to and import from.
SD cardThe memory card the release image is written to. Always named in full, so it is never confused with the card in the backplane.
busUNIBUS or QBUS — the backplane wiring the card drives. Most of this manual applies to both.
QUniBoneThe GitHub organisation, and the older combined name for the two cards, from when the software had no name of its own.
boardOlder issues, mailing-list postings and the original retrocmp articles use this for a running QUniLator, and sometimes for the bare PCB.
demoWhat QUniBone Classic called the interactive menu application. It is installed as qbone-cli / unibone-cli and still does the hardware-level work — the acceptance test runs on it, and it still reads the .cmd scripts an operator already has. See Coming from QUniBone Classic.