Re: Intranet on a green screen terminal ? -- MIDRANGE-L

from Al Macintyre

Seacrest http://www.seacrest.com Deskmaster product extends PC & 
internet-like features to green screen users, such as e-mail, group 
discussions, the internet itself, fill out a form & the data interfaces with 
AS/400 legacy core business apps.   I can dig up more vendor names into stuff 
like this if someone wants.  The more common product is going from the AS/400 
world, like spool file, to PC & internet, while this is bringing PC & 
internet services to the green screen.

That said, understand that you are NOT going to have GUI on a twinax device.
You can NOT run Windows OS off of a green screen terminal.
You can use a mouse, bar code scanner, etc. with some twinax work stations, 
but the screen dimensions are totally unsuited to the resolution neccessary 
to view Win & browser realities.
You CAN connect a PC to the AS/400 via twinax for which there are a myriad of 
connection options.
You CAN put a browser face on traditional AS/400 green screen applications, 
such as LANSA SEAGULL & other products, but this is intended for a PC Win 
user to be looking at the apps - it is not for the twinax work station user.

If you want to get Web pages etc. to a form that can be read by someone using 
a traditional green screen, it is not just a matter of stripping off the HTML 
etc. it is also handling the fact that the character resolution might be too 
wide for the target screen.  You know how if you do command line RUNQRY *N 
then some file name, especially a file with a ton of field names, you have to 
F20 to right or F19 to left to see all the data.  You need something similar 
to view the web page data sideways.

Or you need to capture the data like to a PC printer, except put it into a 
word processor with text wrap-around, so the lines are continuous, then 
twinax user access the data via SEU.

Do you ever hire anyone under the US law that says we cannot discriminate 
against someone because they have a disability such as being blind?  Such 
people can access the internet, using technology that converts text data to 
brail, but I would hazard a guess that 99% of the internet is in violation of 
that law.  You might look into exactly how that is done & see if that 
technology can help you with what you want.

I hope that one of these ideas points you in a practical direction.  And if 
you get this all accomplished, I for one would like to know what products you 
find that get the job done.  May I ask WHY you trying this?  Is it the fact 
that twinax hardware is incredibly stable & inexpensive compared to WinTel?  
Is it that you have a huge investment in twinax cables & you think the 
current internet reality will be around for a while, so that all you really 
need is text translation.  Twinax bandwidth is not going to cut it for some 
directions that the internet is headed in.

Alister William Macintyre 

> From: nicholas.key@15below.com (Nicholas Key)
>  
>  Hi all,
>  
>  Can anyone recommend a package/method for providing traditional AS400 
> terminal users (green screen users) access to an Intranet running on a Win 
2K 
> box with IIS and ASP/HTML pages ? ie. I'm looking for ways of displaying a 
> Windows 2000 based Intranet on "dumb-terminals" or  "green screens" - so 
web 
> apps to the AS400 I guess - can this be done ? 
>  
>  I guess the AS400 would have to have some application which would receive 
> and interpret HTML, strip all the graphics and display as text ?
>  
>  Any pointers welcome as I don't have a clue where to begin !
>  
>  Thanks in advance,
>  Nick

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