Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!ico!vail!rcd From: rcd@ico.ISC.COM (Dick Dunn) Newsgroups: comp.unix.aix Subject: the 3270 is not a terminal Message-ID: <16139@vail.ICO.ISC.COM> Date: 26 Sep 89 20:08:56 GMT Organization: Interactive Systems Corp, Boulder, CO Lines: 21 People have been talking about the 3270 and how AIX (and UTS) have some awkwardness dealing with it. I think it would be a lot more fair to soft- ware folk to turn this around and say that the 3270 has trouble dealing with UNIX. The 3270 is NOT a general-purpose terminal. It can be used for certain classes of transaction entry, and it's got some spiffy features that make it work nicely for that. But it's also designed to some archaic hardware tradeoffs--the most pain- ful being that transmitting to the host machine locks the keyboard. This makes it inherently unsuitable for any sort of fine-grained interaction. Because of this, it imposes a model which is no longer generally accepted and which is pretty hostile--namely that in a dialog between human and machine, the machine completely controls the progress of the dialog. That assumption is so fundamental to the way the 3270 works that you can't do much about it. Probably the best use of a 3270 with a UNIX system would be as barter for a real terminal. -- +---------+ Dick Dunn rcd@ico.isc.com ico!rcd (303)449-2870 | In this | 4th annual MadHatterDay [10/6/89]: | style | A Thousand Points of Madness |__10/6___|