31 Jan
2022
31 Jan
'22
11:35 p.m.
We're in agreement on many of those points. Most vehemently, I'm an
emacs user too, and I think pretty much all other editors (except EDT)
are retarded.
What I take issue with is your insinuation that a particular
current-technology terminal interaction paradigm is somehow obsolete
simply because it is not your preference. That's just BS and you're
more than intelligent enough to know that.
And you sure as hell can do WYSIWYG on a 3270-protocol terminal.
Come see some of the 3290s at LSSM and I'll show you.
-Dave
On 1/31/22 5:27 PM, Thomas DeBellis wrote:
Fair is an interesting word. What is abundantly true
is that the full
duplex and the half duplex folks NEVER agreed. I was one of the very
few people who spent significant time on both (as long as the half
duplex terminal was a 3270).
And it's also true that the 3270 could blow a lot of things out of the
water in terms of speed (when on a byte selector channel) and field
definitions. If you could afford it. Everything about them had some
serious technology, except the price. Yet you couldn't do WSIWYG, not
real WSIWYG. And an attempted port of VisiCalc failed because of this.
A full duplex terminal allowed chording and language understanding,
which allowed faster movement to 'the right place'. It was easier to
get where you wanted instead of having to arrow key because a 3270 has
no idea where you want to go. You can certainly write REXX macros to do
some of this and bind them to function keys. You can get some decent
thing, but now you're hitting the CPU, which defeats the purpose of the
buffering.
I always picked EMAÇS over XEDIT, 100% of the time, but I didn't whine
about using XEDIT, either. A similar fight happened with bringing EMACS
up under Multics. An entire book got written about it. People blabbed
about CPU usage and it's true unless it doesn't matter.
And nobody agrees. I could bring an IBM programmer into my office and
show him EMACS on a 9600 baud terminal. "Look how easy and it knows what
you're typing and ... " Blah, Blah, Blah. They were utterly unmoved, so
I gave up.
For me, my official response was, "I like whatever I'm paid to use".
Right now, that's Windows and a virtual 3270. Privately, it was just
less fingering to do development. I am glad there is no more keyboard
unlock any more. I can't remember how many times I pushed that thing.
On 1/31/22 4:08 PM, Dave McGuire wrote:
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
On 1/31/22 3:22 PM, Thomas DeBellis wrote:
_______________________________________________
HECnet mailing list -- hecnet(a)lists.dfupdate.se
To unsubscribe send an email to hecnet-leave(a)lists.dfupdate.se Then we are probably talking apples and
pineapples.
The product that I'm talking about is exclusively for the 36 bit
line, requiring a DTE to get the data to the PDP-10.
Well, Peter Allan did say he's interested in "2780 emulation for a
PDP-11".
And, Peter, so am I. We have several running mainframes at LSSM,
across the room from a bunch of PDP-11s. One of the things we like to
demonstrate is interoperability between disparate architectures; I'd
love to get something like that working such that we could demonstrate
RJE from a PDP-11 to a mainframe on the other side of the exhibit floor.
I don't recall a 3271, I guess you mean those
green screen terminals?
What a beast... I do recall using 3270, 3276 and the like when I was
hacking the bisync drivers on VM to talk to IBMSPL.
The 3271 is a remote terminal cluster controller for 3270-protocol
terminals.
A number of us swore that IBMSPL was the only
reasonable way to use
an IBM mainframe as the 3270 was a half-duplex terminal that was all
to ready to lock the keyboard if you even thought of typing ahead.
The more modern emulators don't lock like that, but you are still
effectively in a late 1960's half duplex paradigm. Still. Today.
Really.
Tom, I'm sorry but that's not a fair assessment at all. It's not so
much a "half-duplex paradigm" as it is forms- and screen-based. You've
used these systems; I know you know this.
The world thought it was a good enough paradigm to reinvent it for
the WWW, and it's still the most efficient way to get to a big
machine, rather than peck-peck-peck and flood the box with
interrupts. There's nothing "still today really" obsolete about it at
all; it's just that people like you (and me) who are accustomed to
character-by-character interaction with the machine see it as foreign.
And of course it turns into a painful experience when you try to
fake a character-by-character interface with it, with something like
VM or TSO. Think about what's going on to make that happen; there's
no way it won't be at least somewhat painful.
And I'm saying this as a late-comer to the mainframe world; I cut my
teeth on PDP-8 and PDP-11 systems.
-Dave