Re: Proprietary Systems...

["Brad Jensen" <brad@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "jt" <jt@ee.net>
To: <midrange-l@midrange.com>
Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2001 10:45 PM
Subject: RE: Proprietary Systems...


> In marketing, some customers are VERY loyal to brand, and some
aren't.  VERY
> hard to get the first group to switch brands... (Unless you
announce that
> brand isn't going to be available, that is...:-)
>
> Never worked on HP...  So what kind of DB does e3000 run on,

indexed files, as I remember (but that was long ago)

> and how hard
> would it be to convert to DB2/400?  Are the reports true of a
fair about of
> in-house CBL?

Yes.

COBOL/400 is something of a strange beast,  (I mean if you are
coming from minicomputer COBOL, as I did) particularly screen
files.

The only way you could translate those programs to the AS/400 is
if you took the screen handling and made it calls to a client
server module, and put the screen handling on PCs. I could not
begin to tell you how it might perform, since the program would
have to wake up and process each field input as an interactive
cycle - of course if you are avoiding CINT that might be pretty
fast.

I think the applications are likely to be migrated to Unix on HP,
if they haven't already.

I'll write a code translator and PC screen handler, but it will
cost about a million to do the project. Only IBM has pockets that
deep - I sure wouldn't do it on spec.

The only mini I ever saw do page mode screens was Wang VS, I
think.

NCR and Burroughs used them on their mainframes, but not minis.

Most minis used screens that came from the glass tty evolution -
display a bunch of field descriptions on the screen with line and
position and attribute, then accept them one by one in interactive
mode.

Uses up a lot of processor but it's easy to write code for.

AS/400 is a downsized mainframe screen - same full screen mode,
attribute bytes between fields (weird!)

Fill in all the fields and hit transmit - I mean enter.