31 Jan
2022
31 Jan
'22
11:52 p.m.
Oh, let's not overestimate my intelligence; I've been known to say some
exceptionally stupid things and have been corrected so many times by my
betters that it has almost gotten to be habit forming.
I don't think I was insinuating, I think I was more flat out
emphatically stating it. Today, if you are on z/OS, then the typical
way you do development is via a TSO/E session where you write JCL,
submit a batch job and look at the output (or the abend). Nothing's
changed, which is the point--I have programs I wrote back in the 70's
that still run. And the editor than I'm using is little changed from XEDIT.
If I had a choice of using a 3270 to use z/OS in this way, then I would
pick EMACS on a 20 and using IBMSPL. That changes, of course, if you
are using 'foreground' programs. I don't have enough experience with
the OMVS segment (the Unix interface) to have an informed opinion on that.
There is plenty of space for transactional services; CICS has been
evolved to the point that it will do a web interface. A 3270 is really
great for forms fill out; a very tough act to follow. So was a Haziltine
2000, but it's advantage is that it would do both full and half duplex
and cost less.
I would be delighted to come by LSSM. Heck, at this point after being
cooped up so long, I'd be delighted to go anywhere. Was the 3290 the
plasma display? I miss mine. Post a video on YouTube and allow me to
admit the error of my ways. And chording and everything? Control Meta
keys? I don't recall that, just function keys that you could bind to
macros to do the automatic nice things.
On 1/31/22 5:35 PM, Dave McGuire wrote:
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:
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