Re: Viewing 5250 attribute bytes

["Douglas Handy" <dhandy@xxxxxxxxx>]

Steve,

With all due respects to Doug I think the cure is worse than the
> affliction. [smile] Flipping a little switch might have been (in
> retrospect) the most UN-dumb way of having the feature available.


Oh, I am well aware of the advantages of the old 5251 attribute switch, or
keyboard method in many newer terminals.  I missed having the feature
available, which is why I wrote my DspDspAtr attention handling program.  I
don't consider it as nice as a hardware switch, but I think it beats having
nothing at all available.  I also miss having each attribute byte's hex
value immediately viewable when you toggle the switch, but the best I could
come up with is a method to instantly see where the attribute bytes are at
then request the hex value of any given attribute.

It had been so long since I used this though that I had actually forgotten
about it.  That's another advantage of the hardware switch...

I use to mess with user defined streams and I'll probably spend a little
> time with Doug's code because the subject is interesting. That stuff
> doesn't normally come together nicely and I can imagine that Doug had
> fun getting the code to where it worked. Well put together.


It wasn't hard at all, since I was pretty familiar with the 5250 data stream
and what you can do with it.  I used to output 5250 data streams directly
from RPG II on the S/34 as learning exercises (never in production code).
DSM just makes it alot easier to implement some of this stuff.  You can do
some neat things fairly easy with DSM, and this is a case in point.

Doug