AGILE 5250 OPTIMA User’s Guide and ReferencePage viii
About the AGILE 5250 OPTIMA
The AGILE 5250 OPTIMA is a powerful, easy-to-use, intelligent protocol
converter/printer interface controller that allows industry-standard, parallel
or serial, ASCII or EBCDIC printers to be attached to an IBM System 34,
36, 38 or an AS/400. The OPTIMA also can be attached to plotters,
rasterizers, bar code printers and other output devices that support
Centronics parallel or serial interfacing. The alternate host input ports
allow the attached printers to be shared with PCs, DEC VAXes, HP 3000s,
PC LANs and even other protocol converters.
The AGILE 5250 OPTIMA is a self-contained unit with a built-in disk
drive, power supply and operator control panel. It is designed to be fast and
to have maximum flexibility. Up to three twinax addresses (also referred to
as sessions or logical units) are supported. Each is individually
configurable to emulate an IBM 3812 (SCS mode), 4214, 5219, 5224,
5225 or 5256 printer. The OPTIMA automatically validates port addresses
on each active twinax port, thus avoiding address conflicts.
5219 support includes IBM DisplayWrite 36 and Office/400 support,
including multi-column justification, GFIDs with multiple fonts per page,
superscripting, subscripting, bolding, overstriking, backspacing,
underlining, pitch control, sheetfeeder control, page orientation and
format.
Connectivity is provided by two bidirectional serial ports, one parallel
input port and one Centronics parallel output port. The parallel input port
is dedicated to input, which can come from a source such as a PC. The
parallel output port is dedicated to output. The serial ports are
bidirectional, and they can be attached either to additional printers or to
alternate hosts. The serial ports support data rates of 300 baud to 19.2K
baud (input) or 115.2K baud (output). The ports and the software provide
simultaneous support of up to either three output devices and one alternate
host input device, or three alternate hosts and one output device.
The twinax addresses and the alternate host inputs can be individually
configured to print to any and all attached printers, with appropriate
character translation provided by the OPTIMA. It translates IBM twinax
output to parallel or serial output, and it translates high-level formatting
information to a format appropriate for supported printers (i.e., it converts
IBM printer control codes to features found in other printers).