COBOL ON COGS

coboloncogs.org

29 points·troystribling··12 comments

Laugh all you want. I remember when the terminal connections to mainframes and vaxen were being replaced by websites in the mid-to-late 90s. It was astonishing just how much worse websites could be.

Yeah, those old developers would think about what their users were doing - for example, moving between fields would happen in a sensible order, NOT just in the order the HTML was laid out in. Those old apps might look clunky to modern eyes but really, they were polished to a degree that rarely happens these days.

...for those who missed it last April 1.

I do love how INDEX.HTM is all caps.

lol - well done!

I've often teased my "green screen" clients that I could rewrite all their software to run in a browser. (It's not really that much of a stretch.)

What would really be impressive on OP's webpage would be F keys and Esc that worked as advertised in the text. It's really not that hard to coopt them from the browser.

There are very strong parallels between a web app without Ajax/Comet and a 3270 terminal application.

Do you remember when Netscape Navigator used to include a 3270 emulator?

Sorry, I'm too young for that.

Heh :-)

Well, it did; the similarities between the web sans AJAX (which we just called "the web" back then!) and 3270 were noticed by the early Netscape developers too.

Well... I miss my 3278 font a lot. I can't find anything that's really close enough. I remember the numbers were slightly taller than letters.

I wonder if someone has the original pixel maps floating around.

Check out the screen burn-in! LOL!

...and here I'd just been wishing for Prolog on a Pogo Stick, and Malbolge on a Minefield.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com