[svlug] commands

[Skip Evans]

> 
> Interestingly, when googling for TN3270 you can easily see that people
> still make money selling terminal emulators to unfortunate users of lame
> proprietary OS. tn3270 was available in Linux distributions in 1994 when
> I used it to connect to IBM mainframe computer at work. It was more
> stable than a commercial version for Windows users which were paying
> about $300 for a terminal emulator in those days.
> 

Ah, good ol 3270. In the mid 90s I was the lead 
programmer on a project for BellSouth in Atlanta 
that provided a middle layer between new groups 
that were doing things like cell phone records, 
and the old mainframe systems that tracked 
customer records by doing what was called "screen 
scraping." Anyone remember that?

We'd hit the mainframe through tn3270 and read the 
output into memory, "scrape" the data from the 
fields by having the screen layout with x,y 
positions of the data stored in a database, and 
even plug data back in and resubmit screens.

We were amazed it worked, and in fact it worked 
very well. We could process thousands of 
transactions every night that would have taken 
terminal operators weeks. Probably put a few 
people out of work... *sigh*.


-- 
Skip Evans
Big Sky Penguin, LLC
61 W Broadway
Butte, Montana 59701
406-782-2240