26 Jan
2010
26 Jan
'10
3:19 p.m.
On 1/26/10, William Donzelli <wdonzelli at gmail.com> wrote:
Yes, but it was a sliver of the overall terminal market. One of the
things you could use a COMBOARD for was a 3270 session from your VT100
- but there was $15000 in add-on hardware/software between the VT100
user and the PU Type 4 on the other end of the modem to make that
happen. It didn't spawn a lot of VT100 vs 3270 arguments.
That's
just a subset of DEC vs IBM, an old but vigorous one. You
couldn't stick a VT100 on a mainframe (terminal emulator packages
aside) and you couldn't stick a 3270 on a VAX,
I think you could (either way), with the appropriate 3rd party stuff. DEC was not completely unaware of block mode terminals
(VT62? And I
think a VT-100oid?).
The VT62 supported block mode, but was, IIRC, a one-trick pony (it was
apparently used for typesetting apps). The VT100-era version was the
VT131. With either model, it was the application you used that took
advantage of block mode; DEC OSes weren't block-mode-friendly.
-ethan