Re: Proprietary Systems... -- MIDRANGE-L

Does anyone remember HPs stalled attempt at gaining market share from the
S/36 world?

I think it was around 15 years ago, HP developed a "36 / RPGII Mode" for
the 3000.  They shopped around IBM Business Partners (they werent called
that back then - I think they were industry associates or something) to
convert thier s36 RPG packages to run on the 3000.   The 36 mode
automajically converted 36 style screen handling routines to work with HP.
They even changed the workstation controller software to "collect" a
screens worth of data stream and then "blast" it to the green screen all at
once so that it looked more like 5250 (instead of scrolling up from the
bottom).

The company I worked for at the time got a 3000 on loan from HP with the
intent of converting some of our stuff to hp.  If i remember correctly,
this experiment lasted a few months, but the learning curve was pretty
steep, it didn't pay the bills, and at the time, we were pretty busy with
stuff that did.

I don't know how long HP stayed with the program, but as far as I know it
was a non-starter from the beginning.

-------- original message -----
From: "Brad Jensen" <brad@elstore.com>
To: <midrange-l@midrange.com>
Subject: Re: Proprietary Systems...
Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2001 00:01:11 -0600
Reply-To: midrange-l@midrange.com


----- 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.