If there's a market for BSC-based 3270 emulators, let me know. I've written two. (Well, one I only wrote the BSC to/from screen buffer part; my associate John wrote the keyboard and display part.
<g> Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Timothy Sipples Sent: Sunday, April 5, 2020 6:59 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Free 3270 emulator for Mac OS Seymour J. Metz wrote: >A few more notes on nomenclature. TN3270 and TN3270E (upper case) >are protocols published by the IETF; programs implimenting those >protocols are TN3270 clients, not TN3270 emulators. TN3270 clients >are not 3270 emulators, because they do not support any of the link >protocols that real 3270s do, e.g., BSC, CUT, DFT, SDLC. I disagree with the last sentence, and IBM (among many others) does too, evidently. You'll see "emulator" in the IBM Host On-Demand (HOD) documentation, for example. I don't recall HOD ever communicating via BSC or SDLC. "Emulator" has a different meaning than the word "clone," which is the word you might have been looking for. If you want to be pedantic about it, per Wikipedia "IBM 3270" refers to a family of IBM terminals ("displays"), printers, and controllers (following the IBM 2260 family) that IBM refined and improved over several years. All modern "3270" terminal emulators are necessarily partial emulators in certain respects, but practically all of them exceed the capabilities of the last physical/classic 3270 family of products in certain respects, too. Anyway, if you want to describe various 3270 emulators as "partially" emulating the IBM 3279 (for example), that makes sense to me. However, the word "emulator(s)" is perfectly acceptable and appropriate in this context -- in my view and with broad consensus agreement as far as I can tell. "TN3270 emulator" (or "TN3270E emulator") is confusing and not generally correct. If you're using TN3270(E) protocol then you're probably not emulating it. A TN3270(E) client need not be a 3270 terminal emulator. I think most people would not describe an automated test tool that works via a TN3270(E) connection as a "3270 emulator," for example. They'd probably describe it as a "3270 test(ing) tool." - - - - - - - - - - Timothy Sipples I.T. Architect Executive Digital Asset & Other Industry Solutions IBM Z & LinuxONE - - - - - - - - - - E-Mail: [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
