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.
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