Converting the Fermilab accelerator control consoles to X-Window workstations

Abstract

The Fermilab accelerator complex is controlled with 20 consoles based on Digital PDP-11/34s and custom display hardware. A large number of application programs have been written over the years to run on these consoles. The consoles, designed in 1981, are now considered obsolete due to their high hardware cost, difficulty of programming, and the limited address space and computing power of the PDP-11/34. Recently a replacement console has been developed which uses the X-Window windowing system running on a Digital VAXstation workstation. The functionality of the old console hardware is emulated with software. Two major goals of this effort were to allow both console types to coexist in the same control system during a transition period of several years and to be able to run most existing console application programs with little or no modification, using the same source code for both types of console. This paper describes the hardware and software design of the new console workstation, the problems encountered and the status of the project.