Re: 5250 client for Macs

On 23/07/2009, at 2:22 PM, Booth Martin wrote:

There are several highly visible midrange gurus who use Mac laptops. It
occurs to me that there must be a 5250 client that they use/prefer?

The cheapest is Mochasoft--but you get what you pay for. It's a very basic emulator.

There are some complete implementations specifically for the Mac. Try:

http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=mac+5250+emulator

See the MacOrchard link in the resulting list.

On my PowerBook (Power PC chip) I use Virtual PC with PC5250 but it's very slow. When Connectix owned it it had an acceptable speed (slow but usable). After Microsoft bought it it became very slow--almost unusable. Interestingly, I noticed that VirtualPC running a base installation of Win2K ran quite fast but after loading the latest W2K service pack it ran like a three-legged dog. Not my imagination--I could reliably reproduce the behaviour.

I also have an iMac desktop system (Intel chip) on which I use Parallels with PC5250. This is easily fast enough to use as a WinDOS system although I run very little in it except PC5250, testing with IE, and the occasional VPN client where some customer has a non- standard configuration.

Parallels is not expensive and would allow you to run PC5250, Navigator, and the current incarnation of IBM's client development toolset yet still enjoy the Mac experience for e-mail, web browsing, graphics, photos, music, video, etc.

Death to Windows!

Regards,
Simon Coulter.
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