Hacker News Reader

Great! Still in use today at some retailers like Costco and Best Buy!

If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.

3270 is a very efficient form of distributed computing where terminals and their controllers control a lot of state and the mainframe is in charge of the more important things. It was a browser from the 60’s, mostly 70’s.

There are packages available that screen scrape 3270 streams and reformat them to export as html.

It’s really a quite simple transformation. All the core ideas are the same, just the presentation is different.

Close! Costco is 5250, which has many similarities.

They are a very famous AS/400 shop.

Heh, up until a few years ago our inventory system ran on an AS/400, and we had to use 5250 emulators to log in. Don't miss it.

The problem wasn't the AS/400 (IBM i) it was the 5250 interface. That's throwing the baby out with the bath water.

And even then, as with any other UI model, application design plays a massive role.

A lot of gas companies are too, especially on the distribution side. Actually AS/400, and VMS. And very recently.

VMS is very good for high-availability systems.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com