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

Ha! My dad was an expert at soldering and taught me not to do that. :-) :-)

One day while trying to get a new Twinax across the office we were up on the mezzanine looking across the top of the office ceiling which was just drop in fiberglass 2x4 panels covered in 6" of blown cellulose fiber insulation. My Boss tied a bearing to a string intending to throw it across the ceiling to the far wall which was open to the warehouse. He threw too high and hit a building support beam. It bounced back and then dropped straight through the ceiling landing on the desk of one of the sales guys who was on the phone at the time. The cellulose crap came down with it and the tile. Soon as the call was over he 'uttered words' :-) :-) :-)

- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

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

On 1/16/2016 11:03 AM, Jim It wrote:

Larry,

I can add to that. How about putting your arm down on the paddle Soldering arm?

People today have no idea how good they have it. Back in my day, I ran the cabling, did all the connections, made the configuration changes and everything else needed.

Once everything went IP, everything has been a million time better.

Jim


________________________________________
From: MIDRANGE-L <midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx> on behalf of DrFranken <midrange@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, January 15, 2016 10:10 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: 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

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