Re: The Perpetual Myth of iSeries Obsolescence

["Douglas Handy" <dhandy@xxxxxxxxx>]

Booth,

Is there an "enhanced 5250 data stream"?  The scroll bar, radio buttons,
>   check boxes, and push buttons all became available with the advent of
> the enhanced controller, so far as I know?


That is correct; they are part of the enhanced data stream though not all of
them became available in the first version of it IIRC.  When using twinax
you must be connected to a so-called enhanced WS controller which became
available (but not required) somewhere around 1990 or so as I recall, and
became the default WS controller not too long after.  So probably nearly all
400's still in use would have the enhanced WS controller.  Different
terminal types could handle various combinations of the features made
possible by the enhanced data stream commands.

When using other connectivity methods such as TCP/IP, the emulation software
may or may not support all the capabilities of the enhanced data streams.
It would not be surprising to have various features unsupported, especially
those which don't even have a DDS equivalent and can only be done by things
like using DSM or UDDS, etc.  For example, while the original 5250 data
stream requires display positions for attribute bytes, the enhanced data
stream can provide "extended attributes" to set the color and other
attributes of any given screen position indepedent of adjacent positions.
But you can't do that via DDS.

Doug