Re: Looking old (or even worse....Ugly) - The perpetual myth of iSeries Obsolescence

["James H H Lampert" <jamesl@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

My own pet peeve with "ugly" is specific to terminal 
emulation. The use of "alphabet soup" status lines in WSF 
was understandable (although products like the standalone 
emulator packaged with Andrew twinax cards over a decade 
ago demonstrate that it was hardly necessary!)

But why in blazes did Wall Data use alphabet soup for 
RUMBA?? And why, when they finally did offer a GUI-look 
status line, was THAT just an even egregiously cryptic 
example of alphabet soup? Hadn't the people at Wall Data 
ever seen a real terminal? Or if they had, hadn't they 
seen any as recent as, say, a 3180?

Then there's the handful of "genuine IBM" emulators. Sure, 
they've got status lines that look like status lines on 
real terminals. Real 3270 terminals! Ye vish! They 
INVENTED the 5250 terminal; you'd think they'd be able to 
come up with an aesthetically pleasing emulation of one!



Oh, and technically, "dumb terminal," strictly speaking, 
means an ASCII-based "glass teletype," without cursor 
addressing, much less attributes. Machines like the Lear 
Siegler ADM-3, or a number of similarly Spartan models 
from Teleray. In particular, there is nothing "dumb" about 
ADM-1s, Datamedia Elites, Teleray 10s, or DEC VT52s and 
VT100s. And most especially, there is nothing the least 
bit dumb about anything that uses the 3270 or 5250 data 
streams.

Non-programmable, yes (although InfoWindow IIs do have 
programmable mouse button capability). Dumb, no.

--
JHHL