How we use tn5250 (fwd) -- LINUX5250

Hi,

This was sent to me and I thought others might like to see it.  I want to
thank everyone who has helped to get the emulator to it's current state of
usability.  I especially want to thank Jason Felice, who has really kept
the momentum going while I've been busy with other things.  I don't even
know how much of my code is even still in there. ;-)

I never would have guessed 3 years ago when I started this that it would
have been used by more than a few people.  This open source stuff really
works. :-)

Mike Madore

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 07 Mar 2000 09:23:06 -0600
From: Will Crowe <wcrowe@maxcessintl.com>
To: mmadore@blarg.net
Subject: How we use tn5250

I'm sure you and a lot of other people have put considerable effort in
your tn5250 emulator project.  You may recall that I've written before
to ask questions about configuration of the software and you have very
graciously helped me out.

I thought you might like to know how the software is being used.  First,
a bit of history.  Our company was using a labor reporting system which
was nearly ten years old.  It consisted of some IBM 7526 data collection
terminals (DCT's) which communicated with an OS/2 server which in turn
sent transactions to our AS400.  The DCT's were old and many were
defective and needed to be replaced.  Since IBM doesn't make them any
more this would be very expensive.  The software which they ran was
written in C and we had no C expertise in the shop, so it was not
possible to modify the software.  Furthermore, the system only allowed
data to travel in one direction, which meant that errors could only be
caught by the cost accountant after it had been posted.

One division of our company makes a control unit which is basically a
diskless PC with a proprietary card in it and Intel 486/100 processors.
They had a number of these boxes which they were going to scrap in order
to replace them with units using more powerful Pentium processors.  I
decided that these might be turned into diskless workstations which
could serve as a replacement for the labor reporting system.

The only operating system which made sense for the project was Linux
because it was inexpensive and would allow the creation of diskless
workstations.  All we needed was a good tn5250 emulator.  That's where
you came in.  We built a prototype which booted Linux from a floppy and
telnetted to a Linux server.  Once there, the user could run an instance
of the tn5250 emulator and log onto the AS400.  Using this prototype we
developed the labor software, chose our other components (like scanning
guns), worked out new procedures and did training for the employees.
Meanwhile, we built the workstations  using NIC adapters from
DisklessWorkstations.com and outsourced the server configuration to some
local Linux experts who configured everything for a few hundred bucks.

To make a long story short, we turned on the system live yesterday and
it works great.  Your emulator is very reliable and in my opinion could
be considered past the "beta" stage.  We were able to build our new
labor reporting system for about $2,000.  When you consider that they
originally expected to spend $75,000 to $100,000 on a new system, this
represents a very, very significant savings.

After all the effort which has gone in to the emulator I thought you and
the other developers might like to know how your creation is being used
to do real work.  I am not on the mailing list, but feel free to forward
this message to the list and other developers.  If anyone else would
like to know more details about how we set up our system I can be
contacted at wcrowe@maxcessintl.com.

Cordially,


Will Crowe



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