Re: The Perpetual Myth of iSeries Obsolescence

[Larry Bolhuis <lbolhuis@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Alrighty then! I propose that henceforth and forevermore the interface 
formerly known as 'Green Screen' shall be known as the Non Programmable 
Terminal User Interface or NPTUI. (Pronouncd "en-patooey").  This way 
the thing doesn't have the stigma of oldness, greenness, or forced to be 
24 rows of 80 characters and gets to take it's place amount the other 
forms of User Interfaces.

I will however only accept the replacement of the 'green screen' name if 
all who read here promise to no longer use such equally antiquated terms 
as AS/400,  and iSeries and promise only to use the names System i and 
System i family.

Deal, or no Deal?

  - Larry

ps: I saw an Infowindow II with a mouse connected once. It also had a 
nice little mouse holder stuck to the upper right side of the terminal. 
The mouse once connected to the terminal was placed in the holder and 
I'm quite certain it was never, ever, removed from that holder.

James H H Lampert wrote:
> Some comments:
>
> 1. I loathe and detest the pejorative "green screen." When 
> I first learned to code, over a quarter-century ago, 
> terminals with a green-phosphor tube were regarded as a 
> luxury, with a substantial premium on the pricetag; the 
> terminals I had in high school and at the University were, 
> almost without exception, equipped with white P4 phosphor 
> tubes no different from those in black-and-white 
> television sets.
>
> 2. Monochrome terminals (and monochrome computer 
> monitors)of the past twenty years have often used amber, 
> rather than green, screens, because studies have shown 
> that while a green long-persistence screen is less 
> fatiguing to look at than a white P4 screen, a 
> medium-persistence amber screen is even less fatiguing.
>
> 3. At Touchtone, we have three actual twinax terminals: a 
> 3489 with a color monitor and a 3477FA (amber), both at my 
> desk, and a Yestation with a color monitor as the console. 
> The last terminal we had with an actual green screen was 
> our 3180, which eventually developed a short so bad it 
> made the fuses go off like flashbulbs.
>
> 4. InfoWindow II terminals have mouse support.
>
> 5. It's entirely possible to put an emulation session in a 
> web browser, and even make it available for public use; we 
> use our ThinView product to put an emulation session in a 
> browser for our new "code-on-demand" self-service 
> authorization code system.
>
> --
> JHHL
>