the 3270 is not a terminal

[Dick Dunn]

People have been talking about the 3270 and how AIX (and UTS) have some
awkwardness dealing with it.  I think it would be a lot more fair to soft-
ware folk to turn this around and say that the 3270 has trouble dealing
with UNIX.  The 3270 is NOT a general-purpose terminal.  It can be used
for certain classes of transaction entry, and it's got some spiffy
features that make it work nicely for that.

But it's also designed to some archaic hardware tradeoffs--the most pain-
ful being that transmitting to the host machine locks the keyboard.  This 
makes it inherently unsuitable for any sort of fine-grained interaction.
Because of this, it imposes a model which is no longer generally accepted
and which is pretty hostile--namely that in a dialog between human and
machine, the machine completely controls the progress of the dialog.  That
assumption is so fundamental to the way the 3270 works that you can't do
much about it.  Probably the best use of a 3270 with a UNIX system would be
as barter for a real terminal.
-- 
+---------+     Dick Dunn    rcd at ico.isc.com    ico!rcd      (303)449-2870
| In this |         4th annual MadHatterDay [10/6/89]:
|  style  |            A Thousand Points of Madness
|__10/6___|