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The IBM mainframe architecture was such that the mainframe didn't deal with individual keypresses at the terminal, instead interactions were bundled at the term
by dhosek 6y ago
The IBM mainframe architecture was such that the mainframe didn't deal with individual keypresses at the terminal, instead interactions were bundled at the terminal and sent a record (which could be a whole screen full of XEDIT work) at a time. This meant that normally only IBM terminals could be used, but it was possible to use a dedicated system for managing dumb ASCII terminals to translate to EBCDIC and emulate a lot of the computational power of the 3270 terminals.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- lowobservable 6y agoYep, the IBM 3174 terminal controller Asynchronous Emulation Adapter or feature allowed you to connect ASCII terminals to a mainframe host and allowed 3270 devices to connect to an ASCII host. There were options from other companies in those days too. Later, with LAN connectivity, there was quite a bit of bridging different technologies you could do with a 3174.