There was an entire second collection of terminals that were used to talk to Digital Equipment Corp. One reason was these huge monster connectors:īut mainframe terminals weren’t the only kinds of terminals. IBM tried for many years to convince corporations that its Token Ring cabling scheme was superior, but eventually this too went the way of the Dodo and now you would be hard pressed to find any Token Ring anywhere in use. These were connected to the mainframe at a single gateway. Starting in the late 1980s, the mainframe cabling was replaced with local area networks of PCs. Photo credit of 3270 IBM PC: John Elliott It had its own plug-in cards and special keyboard with two rows of function keys as you can see here in the photo. IBM even made for some time a 3270 PC (the model 5271) that combined the two together. Now we have multiple devices on our desktop (tablets, smart phones) and multiple monitors, so I am not sure this is progress. This was a semi-big deal, because it meant that you didn’t need to have two devices sitting on your desktop: the 3270 terminal and the PC. When PCs came into businesses, one of their first uses was to stick a card inside them and run 3270 emulation software so they could talk to the mainframes and be used as terminals. They could be found on many corporate desktops and looked like this:

These things displayed 80 characters across text in a single color, and that color was usually green (hence the name green-screen terminals). For those of you that are still reading, this is a product that allows you to connect to a command-line console (such as Terminal in Mac OS or Windows HyperTerminal).īack in this Jurassic era, we had big CRT-terminals that connected to our mainframes with a variety of other boxes, using coaxial cabling. The memories were trigged by a press release from Attachmate, which is now probably the largest software vendor of things that you don’t really care to try or buy, including probably the leading commercial vendor of Reflection, a terminal emulator. If the term “command line” reminds you more of the movie Tron than of something you actually use everyday, then perhaps you won’t find much joy from reading the following post.īut for the rest of us that grew up when PC DOS first came into corporations and when mainframe programmers walked among us, you might enjoy this trip down memory lane. There is no Flash here, no OCD multi-tasking, cutting-and-pasting from one window to another.

For those of you that cut your teeth on graphical OSs and have never had to use a command-line terminal emulator, this article isn’t for you.

Mainframe emulator for mac