On Wed, Oct 04, 2000 at 05:07:17PM -0400, Bill Sommerfeld wrote:
> tn3270 is only of interest if you want to log into an ibm mainframe
> and pretend to be a 3270 terminal.
> 
> > I am trying to figure out the main differences between tn3270 and telnet.
> > (FreeBSD moved tn3270 from the base to its packages collection last year.)
> 
> given how many dinosaurs are left, this probably makes sense.

They are still making new mainframes. In fact, 64-bit mainframes are
on the way. IBM has some super-sexy features on current mainframes, like
tying a number of them together with sharing of drives etc, and then load
balancing across the multiple servers. Imagine a system that doesn't
appear to ever reboot because individual machines in it were rebooted
one at a time.

Driving the Olympics were bazillions of PCs, a number of RS/6000 boxes,
and three (count em', three) mainframes "sysplexed" together. 
 
> > I have never logged on to a "real" IBM 3270-class mainframe (just a lot of
> > machines that act like it).
> > 
> > What is a "IBM VM/CMS"?
> 
> CMS is a guest operating system which runs within a VM virtual
> machine.
> 
> VM is an OS for IBM mainframes which runs other OS's, each in their
> own virtual machines.

VM is sooo slick that it can run VM as a guest of VM. Useful for testing
new OS images before upgrading production servers, etc. 
-- 
"It seems that for any computer to be taken seriously these days it has
 to be be IBM compatible, and I think that's a shame. In Europe, they don't
 depend on IBM compatibility. They buy the best computer for the job (or
 so I hear)." -- Steve Tibbett, from "Compute!'s Computer Viruses" (1988)