Date   : Mon, 25 Jul 2011 20:18:36 -0500
From   : jules.richardson99@... (Jules Richardson)
Subject: Risc PC (Was 'Minitel in France')

J.G.Harston wrote:
> The job booking system at %BIGCORP% runs in a terminal session in the
> background that a GUI frontend grabs the focus of and moves between
> various text boxes and "types" into because they are terrified of
> tampering with the original code and killing it. ;)

It's not running SSA software under the covers, is it? :-)
"screen-scraping" of the AS/400 terminals which were normally used to 
access their suite of apps used to be commonplace during the 90s; porting 
the actual code to something else was either too expensive, too 
complicated, or too risky - or some combination of the three.

When all was said and done, it did work surprisingly well though - the 
nature of the kinds of gigantic[1] front-ends that were built onto these 
kinds of systems meant that they were often either waiting on user input or 
waiting on the database to crunch numbers, so a few extra cycles in the 
presentation code made little difference. I don't think the API layer which 
talked to an [emulated] AS/400 terminal under the covers was particularly 
resource-hungry, either, so in that sense there wasn't a big hardware 
overhead to worry about.

[1] in our case it was several million lines of code, and a complete system 
build would be kicked off in an evening and be done by the morning if you 
were lucky :-)

cheers

Jules