Agilent Technologies user manual About the Agile 5250 Optima

Page viii AGILE 5250 OPTIMA User’s Guide and Reference

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).