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IBM terminals are a completely different thing than what the popular minicomputer systems had. From what I understand, the 3270 wasn't a simple serial device. I
by spauldo 2y ago
IBM terminals are a completely different thing than what the popular minicomputer systems had. From what I understand, the 3270 wasn't a simple serial device. IBM had the advantage that they had control of the entire ecosystem, so their hardware and software worked together much like Apple stuff does today.
Minicomputers (and some mainframes) generally used the kind of terminals as described in the article. Those things were everywhere.
- port_wire 2y agoThe wiki page for 3270 shows so many devices and machines that were designed and created by IBM. Does IBM make anything like that these days ?
- spauldo 2y agoI'm sure they do. I've seen 3270s in use in a few places in the last few years. I'm not sure what they use for new designs, though - I don't hear much about the mainframe world from my part of the industry.
- ChuckMcM 2y agoApologies for not being clear, 3270s are VERY different from the terminals that connect to mini-computers and the VT-series from DEC. That said, the product capability that mini-computers were going after was to replace mainframes, and mainframes had 3270s and they could do this really cool thing. There wasn't anything particularly special about the 3270 terminal controller or the capabilities of the 3270 that couldn't be implemented in an alternative way. For a mini-computer terminal to get a similar customer experience they needed to be more than just paperless teletypes. That started with the VT05 which was introduced in 1970 and had directly addressable cursor. Replaced by the VT50 in '74 and then the VT52 in '75 when things really started to get cooking. As the DEC-10 and later VAX started being sold to customers instead of them buying an IBM machine things really took off.