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IBM 3270 PC, Boy I'd love one of these.

ibmapc

Veteran Member
Joined
Apr 5, 2010
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Location
Albany, OR USA
I wonder what the final price will be on THIS. I'm sure it will be beyond my budget. If it's as good as the seller states, I'd love to have it in my collection. I guess I can still dream. I'll check back on it in a couple of days. My Dad used to work at IBM San Jose when I was a kid. He had one of these on his desk at work that he used as his daily driver. I remember he demonstrated some of it's features, one being a "multi window environment". Pretty cool stuff for it's time.
 
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Nice to have but looking closely at the pics it has some wear and tear and i think i can see rust in places, Hard to tell what it'll go for but you never know with ebah.
 
Battle of the Autism.
It will either go to someone who knows precisely what they will use it on, or to Geekhack and the computer will be on Craigslist sans the keyboard before the end of the month.
I have the guts to one and even I never really figured out what viable use would come of a 3270 PC besides for show. The process to even setup Hercules to connect to one is pretty complex.
 
Well I have a 3174 with ethernet card so could connect one to Hercules, but the whole setup feels like its running on borrowed time. the 2.4Mb floppies disks are as rare as hens teeth. Then St225 in the controller tends to die at the slightest whim. Then most folks only have token ring 3174s and need some sort of bridge to get to Hercules. Of course I could put a Token Ring card in the PC Server 500 and run the OS/2 router, but then the PC Server 500 also has a P390 card in so can just connect normally....
 
besides being "rare" because It is I get it. Whats the difference between this computer and any run of the mill XT running a 3270 terminal emulation card (doesnt have to be an IBM card) besides the spiffy keyboard?
 
Nothing. What you're paying for is essentially the 3720 emulation card (cards?) and the keyboard.

Partially correct.

The boardset consists of the coax interface, two or three boards that make up the video system with CGA emulation and a special little card that allows the keyboard to generate the scancodes for the extra keys while still being compatible with the XT scancodes. A Y-cable dongle with two DIN plugs and a DB9 plug that goes into the card is where the real magic happens. A nearly complete set just leaves enough room for a floppy and hard disk controller.

CGS_1173.jpg

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsandy/Computer related/CGS_1173.jpg

Also yes, with the exception of the machine complaining that it can't see the coax board at POST you can drop the keyboard interface card into a machine without the rest and run the extra large keyboard with a key mapper to address the other keys normally DOS applications cannot see.
 
I am sure you can find a generic terminal for much less (or maybe not I have not looked). I have a few DEC VT525's with DEC keyboards I purchased for the cost of a happy meal so I am good (got every lucky at a recycler, same place I snagged my DEC MicroVax from).

How many people keep an IBM mainframe at home to need the 3270?
 
I have seen singleboard 3270 emulation cards in both 8 and 16 bit ISA formats. Maybe you needed a special keyboard, but I have seen these systems with just the card.
 
Methinks the jewel here is not that it's an overly large 3270 terminal emulator that any other software or hardware could do better but an official IBM product.
 
Methinks the jewel here is not that it's an overly large 3270 terminal emulator that any other software or hardware could do better but an official IBM product.

Yes, that's part of it, but for me, it's remembering my dad using one at work at IBM Cottle Rd. San Jose. A time long since gone.

Greg
 
I am sure you can find a generic terminal for much less (or maybe not I have not looked). I have a few DEC VT525's with DEC keyboards I purchased for the cost of a happy meal so I am good (got every lucky at a recycler, same place I snagged my DEC MicroVax from).

How many people keep an IBM mainframe at home to need the 3270?

Whilst you can find a generic terminal for less, a 3270 is not a generic terminal. A 3270 has a coax connection to a mainframe controller. The connection runs at 1.5MBits so a cut above the average. The controller buffers keystrokes and only sends input to the mainframe when you press the enter key, or a Function or Attention key. Normal editing so insert/delete character is handled in the controller, so the Mainframe has very little work to do to handle a screen. Contrast that with VMS with a VTxxx. The user hits a key. VMS pages the user program in, passes the keystroke to the user program. For most characters the user program echos the character back to the terminal, and then gets paged out by VMS. The result is that on a heavily loaded machine you get into "type behind" where you type three or four characters and have a long wait before they appear of the screen.

As for how many folks have an IBM mainframe at home, well the modern controllers work with the Hercules emulator. There are over 7000 people in the Hercules emulator list so plenty of folks running emulation....
.. the P390 is an IBM Mainframe card that could be installed in a PC server or RS6000 unix box. There are 200 folks on the P390 mail list. I guess a few have P390's at home (I do)....
.. so probably more than you would expect...
 
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