Re: Character-based (Green screen)/twinax systems?

You MUST have known different people than I!! There were only a million ways to mess up twinax. Some of my favorites:

Connect a terminal to a non-grounded outlet. Eventually it fed 110V back up the shield of the twinax, dumfounding all devices on the string. (AND Shocking the hardware guy that came to swap the printer!)

Leave the extra twinax cable length laying on top of a fluorescent light fixture. Every time the light was turned on or off the surge would clobber every terminal on the line.

People who rearranged their office or desk and disconnected the terminal taking down everyone on the string. Several times they just yanked the twinax out of the connector.

Cleaning people who while cleaning disks would inadvertently flip switches.

Guy hanging picture in the hallway with long screw that radar locked on the twinax in the wall, shorting it out. Yeah took a while to find that one!

Seriously in every place I worked with Twinax (and there were many) problems were routine.

Once it was migrated to active patch panels using Cat 5 and baluns it got a lot better as for the most part screwing up one terminal screwed up JUST that one terminal but it still was far from 'rock solid reliable!'

- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

www.Frankeni.com
www.iDevCloud.com - Personal Development IBM i timeshare service.
www.iInTheCloud.com - Commercial IBM i Cloud Hosting.

On 1/15/2016 2:25 PM, Justin Taylor wrote:

I agreed about the rock solid reliability of old twinax hardware. Unfortunately, twinax is no longer supported on current hardware.

You can do still do 5250 emulation. While still fully supported, it's rather antiquated and not something I would try to get into now.



-----Original Message-----
From: Bernard McNeill [mailto:bm.email01@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Friday, January 15, 2016 11:14 AM
To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Character-based (Green screen)/twinax systems?

Hello,

(Very!) many years ago I worked with a s/38 using dumb char-based terminals (including op console).
It was a successful setup.
Everything was very simple, and very, very reliable.

Now I am in a position to influence some IT.

So, my question:
Does the system i (or whatever the S/38 is currently called today) allow for simple dumb terminal, twinax connectivity?

Best regards