Re: Some fodder for marketing, perhaps

About 5 years ago I worked for an as400 shop that couldn't afford to buy pc's 
for their manufacturing floor and had about 50 decision data terminals that 
needed upgrades for V5R1.   
 
In the end we bought eprom chips for about 100 bucks a pop!  Old technology but 
cheap and one that shouldn't go away for manufacturing floors.   

-----Original Message-----
From: rob@xxxxxxxxx
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Fri, 6 Jan 2006 13:04:33 -0500
Subject: RE: Some fodder for marketing, perhaps


Technically you cannot buy a terminal from IBM anymore.  They stopped 
making them.  You can get IBM terminals on the used market.  Funny, but 
when was the last time a business purchased a PC on the used market for 
business purposes?  Third party terminals are available.  Don't know the 
prices.
We got tired of the twinax hassle.  Twinax cabling, and it's balun 
alternative, seemed to involve a lot of boosters, etc to get the signal to 
stay up.  Some locations would still have a lot of issues.  We don't seem 
to have that problem with Ethernet.  I don't know if there is better fault 
recovery in the protocol, or if we just did it right when we cabled for 
Ethernet.  Couple that with the fact that IBM's newer twinax card 
controllers don't put out the signal strength that the old ones did (IBM 
published fact) and the fact that most of our users need Notes and stuff, 
and you get that terminals just had to be replaced.

For internet control we have software to block the stronger offending 
sites.  Examples have been made of certain people.  And we use Windows 
Administration to control which users get browser capability.  It takes a 
signature from a controller to get approval to get browser access.

Rob Berendt