On Sun, Apr 5, 2015 at 11:18 AM, Buck Calabro <kc2hiz@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I exclusively
use the open source tn5250 and don't miss File Transfer at all.
Imagine this exercise: Change the properties of the desktop link to
point to tn5250 instead of IBM i Access. How many would call telling
you that they can no longer do X, where X is a feature of IBM i Access
that is unavailable in alternative emulators?
Interestingly (and sorry for responding to perhaps the most off-topic
portion of an otherwise very pertinent and insightful post), I am one
of those folks that really has a strong preference for IBM i Access.
And for relatively superficial-sounding reasons.
Let me back up slightly: I have not used "THE open-source tn5250".
Not that I know of. I have used Mocha and some other emulator, maybe
PowerTerm. (And I'm a bit hazy on the specifics, but could Mocha
possibly be built from the open-source tn5250, in a similar way that
RDi is built from open-source Eclipse?)
But I think I can still respond in the proper spirit of Buck's
question. I prefer IBM i Access because (1) I'm still primarily a
green-screen user, and (2) my eyes work the way they do. I have an
extremely unusual configuration of Access, unique as far as I know. I
use windowed mode, not full-screen, and on top of that, I force the
*font* to stay the same size whether I've got 80 or 132 columns.
Nothing else I've tried has that capability. And then (3), the
alternatives I've tried haven't been able to do quite the same
keyboard mappings and replicate the visual aspects of the genuine
article.
Finally, I don't know if you're counting the ODBC driver that comes
with Access. I would be fine if I lost the "Access file transfers"
(the ones that use .dtt and .dtf files) but I would need some
replacement for the ODBC driver.
Bonus ponder: When you think of the cost of SEU, are you including the
IBM i Access for Windows expense?
I'm not. In part because I so rarely think of the cost of SEU, and in
part because I don't *know* most of the dollar costs for anything on
the i. But also because I don't think of terminal emulation as
coupled with source code editing. Compilers and source code editing
are pretty tightly coupled to me. Either one is nearly useless
without the other. But terminal emulation has a use even without any
developer tools. And you can still use developer tools (server-side
or not) without terminal emulation (because you can access server-side
tools with an *actual* terminal).
John Y.
midrange.com
