12 Oct
2005
12 Oct
'05
10:25 p.m.
Gil Carrick declared on Wednesday 12 October 2005 11:47 pm:
...
Ok, I'm gonna run to my car and get the manual for the terminal I'm
talking about....
Are you sure about that? It sounds a lot like
the coax or
twinax terminals that IBM made to go with 3270-controllers or
AS/400s (respectively). The ones I've seen which match your
description had an
RS-232 for a printer connection, but did their main comms
through the coax or twinax port out the back. I guess it
might be ASCII but probably isn't an RS-232 terminal.
Most 3270 & 5250 class terminals used printers that were similarly
attached (co-ax or twin-ax). Later models might have supported serial
printers, but I doubt it. There were several vendors who made
"protocol converters" specifically so that users could attach cheap
parallel printers to their mainframes and midrange systems. Andrew was
one that I recall.
IBM also made some weird terminals that almost defy classification,
especially for word processing applications. From the "IBM 3197 Model C Color Display Station
Setup Instructions".
Page 76, step 9.1.9: "If you have a printer (IBM
4201, IBM 5201, or IBM
4202), attach it to the logic element of your display station." That
caption is accompanied by a picture showing a printer connecting via a
cable with a DB25-looking connector to the terminal.
I'd imagine that wasn't meant to be used for printing labels, form
letters, etc, like the bigger coax/twinax printers that IBM sold were
meant for.
Pat
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