Re: The joy of octal

On 11/15/24 3:30 PM, Harold Stevens wrote:

In <lppi68FktfdU1@mid.individual.net> rbowman:
 [Snip...]
 

Until three or four years ago a Midwestern US state's criminal justice API
used EBCDIC and the 3270 protocol. There is little uniformity in the
various state CJIN interfaces but that was one of the stranger ones.

 FWIW...
 When I retired from a major defense contractor (circa ~2003), we
were still using an emulator on Linux boxen for payroll timecard
input, probabably running on IBM COBOL in a corporate backwater:
 The x3270 Wiki
https://x3270.miraheze.org/wiki/X3270#
 

   I've discovered that the more you look, the more
   you find - in terms of 60s hardware/cpus/programs.
   This stuff is STILL in use at various levels from
   yer local school district to the IRS and beyond.
   It WORKS - and was a HUGE investment back in the
   day, UNAFFORDABLE to replace/debug now. They will
   use this stuff until the magic smoke finally
   escapes forever and ever. Then - disaster.
   Oh, and the COBOL done by those narrow-tie Dilberts
   in the 60s was DAMNED GOOD - really pro.
   As for terminals, I liked the Textronics 4000
   series a lot more. For text + simple graphs
   vector really was faster/sharper than bitmap ...
   at least back in the low-bandwidth day.
   Way WAY back in the day, BBS era, you could
   send/receive TEXT just fine - albeit often
   at 300 baud. The PROBLEM was that there were
   LOTS of early PC models - Atari, Commodore, RS
   etc. I proposed encoding pages/graphics in
   the Textronix 4000 'language' and then writing
   smallish apps for each brand/type of PC.
   Basically the logic behind Java or PDFs. The
   idea never caught on alas ... but bandwidth
   did increase rapidly and the variety of PCs
   shrank so The Problem kinda-sorta took care of
   itself once HTML/CGI and such was practical.