In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, =?UTF-8?B?TGFycyBOb29kw6lu?= writes: >It was definitely big business in the mid-1990's: to put a web interface >on top of old legacy systems, a middle layer mapped out X and Y >coordinates of every character on the terminal and then 'scraped' what >was in the expected spot.
Just to pull rank here: First time I did a scraper, it was written in RM cobol, using a IBM 3274 communications package over named pipes on a Zilog S8000 system, coupled up via a 4800 bps sync dial-up half-duplex modem-line to the Danish State Radio's IBM mainframe. The target of our desire was their record-collection database, and they paid us to do it, because they wanted to use a bar-code scanner to track materials in and out of the discoteque. It worked fine for months, until december first, when their VTAM wizards put a nice colored X-mas candle on the login-in screen, overrunning the fixed size buffer in the 3274 emulations handling of VTAM session openings ("What ? You can have a login-screen which takes multiple packets ??!" as the telex from the US based company who delivered the 3274 packaged replied). The year must have been 1985 or 1986. Poul-Henning -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 [EMAIL PROTECTED] | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. _______________________________________________ Soekris-tech mailing list Soekris-tech@lists.soekris.com http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech