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I got a bit lost at what you were explaining. Could you try again for me please? Adam Lang Systems Engineer Rutgers Casualty Insurance Company http://www.rutgersinsurance.com ----- Original Message ----- From: "Brad Jensen" <brad@elstore.com> To: <midrange-l@midrange.com> Sent: Monday, January 07, 2002 1:54 PM Subject: PC terminal server for 5250 > This may be a crazy idea. I've mentioned it in part before. > > I had my programmers create a TN3270 full screen terminal > interface for our archiving product, which is about to enter > beta. They also created a TN5250 full screen interface (we were > using a custom > TCP/IP client on the AS/400). > > With a little more programming, we could > > - create a general purpose terminal server on a PC > - create a menu system in that server for calling VB6 client > programs (or other programs that will create activex dlls) > - create terminal reading and writing routines for those DLLS to > call > > And what you would get is > > A programmer could write a single-instance VB6 program, that > would talk to one screen and accept input and write output to > it. The server would call the program selected by the person at > the 5250 or 3270 terminal from a menu. It would create one > instance of the program for each person using it, so the > programming remains simple. > > Actually the way VB works, is that one copy of the program > exists in memory as long as any session is using it, and a new > data area exists for each user. We did 1000 simultaneous > instances on a 100Mhz 64MB NT box. (It was a real old CPU). > > Think of it as Cytrix for character terminals. > > What could those VB programs do? Database entry and lookup, > scheduling and calendaring. Email. Web surfing. Customer service > into your web-centric database from 3270 terminals. > > And of course you could create a rapid application development > system on top of the VB interface. > > It could get pretty crazy. > > How much more development do we need? Not very much. The hard > part is done. > I know menuing systems, I've written them (in COBOL). The screen > handling is done, and we've written a number of TCP/IP server > programs. > > We could also make the server program talk to 'standard' Telnet > terminals, and even web browsers if that made sense to do. > > You could run the server program on an integrated netfinity > server (or whatever they call it this month) and have the VB > programs talk OLEDB or ODBC to the AS/400 database, if you want. > Now you would be writing new programs for your AS/400 in VB 6, > that support classic terminals. > > VB6 programmers are a lot easier to find than RPG programmers. > > So how crazy is this idea?
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