A: Because Bob lives in alternate universe where you still define technology options around IBM offerings like it was 1987. His new financial startup is like an early cloud computing customer -- entering into a time sharing agreement with his local bank to utilize their excess MIPS via ISDN. :)

If you're using a stack dependent on 3270/5250 connectivity, you're better off using stuff like this. IBM supports it end to end, and it will support all of the functions in the terminal without code changes or other workarounds. Nowadays increasingly fewer people actually know what they are talking about with these technologies, and you're better off touching as few things as possible!