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thomas@inorbit.com wrote: . . . > Personally, although I've heard all the arguments, I still don't see why > 5250 is clung to so tightly. . . . It is not possible to argue that you > cannot make a GUI environment as fast, effective, efficient, whatever, as > green-screen for any function . . . . . . . Dear Mr. Liotta (et al.): Bovine Scat. Personally, I've never been able to understand why everybody and his dog seems to have jumped on the terminal-bashing bandwagon. Here are ten reasons to stick with 5250. 10) We're not talking about "glass teletypes" like the old Lear ADM-3s here. We're not even talking about Lear ADM-1s, or DEC VT-100s or Teleray 10s, that can do attributes, screen formatting, and protection, but require near-constant host attention to do it. We're talking about one of the most sophisticated NPT standards ever devised, with formatting, attributes, protection, color, 132-column support, and data validation, all handled with minimal host supervision. 9) 5250 terminals are cheap, and incredibly rugged. The 3487 on my desk was purchased, probably used, before I joined the company, and has been sent out for repairs exactly once during my tour of duty. By contrast, I'm on at least my fourth Windoze machine (not counting the old PS/2-65 at my desk, that's primarily a DOS-only machine), despite the fact that each new Windoze machine I've been issued, I accepted under protest. 8) Nobody has ever managed to infect a terminal with a virus. 7) Terminals don't need to have operating system updates every few years. 6) Exposing a terminal to the public is not nearly as big of a security risk as exposing even a network-booting diskless Windoze workstation is. 5) A terminal/host environment is the ultimate in centralized software maintenance 4) 5250 terminals are not what they were when the standard was devised. They aren't even what they were when the 5250 data stream manual was last revised. For about a decade, they've had color, 132-column support, semigraphics, and mouse support on all but the cheapest models, and the top-of-the-line models have had bitmap support. 3) True graphical user interfaces are an inefficient use of memory and processing power, and Windoze is the most ridiculously wasteful of all of them. When the first Macintosh hit the market, it needed a whole 68000 for one user, without particularly fast response times, in an era when 68000s were primarily used as CPUs for small timeshare systems. 2) Current 5250 terminals are extremely legible even in 132-column mode. I've never seen that level of 132-column legibility with any emulator, including the one I designed and helped write, unless the graphics card and monitor were themselves at least as expensive as a 3487. 1) If a terminal goes down with a hardware fault, it's easy to move to another one, or to use an emulator instead, while it's being worked on. If a desktop system goes down, everything on its local hard drive is inaccessible while it's down. -- James H. H. Lampert Professional Dilettante http://www.hb.quik.com/jamesl http://members.hostedscripts.com/antispam.html http://www.thehungersite.com Read My Lips: No More Atrocities!
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