3270font: A Font for the Nostalgic

Re:3270font: A Font for the Nostalgic by tdeck on Thursday October 01, 2020 @01:11AM (#24647543)

For those not familiar with the 3270 terminals they're actually kind of interesting and very different from more familiar character-cell terminals. I found this out doing the "master the mainframe" contest years back - it's like a whole other world. Each screen has a set of editable regions (with formatting) and the terminal provides a line editor for those regions, and a way to submit the whole screen's edits to the mainframe. That way a user can fill out a whole form without the computer receiving any interrupts at all.

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Re:3270font: A Font for the Nostalgic by app4soft on Thursday October 01, 2020 @11:19AM (#24651891)

> For those not familiar with the 3270 terminals they're actually kind of interesting and very different from more familiar character-cell terminals.

As I'm using 3270font for while, I found it the best typeface to inspire engineers for switch to FreeCAD[0,1,2], as actual most popular proprietary 2D/3D CAD software becomes almost useless[3] since 2020.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24513340#24514936

[1] https://twitter.com/app4soft/status/1311679930254733312

[2] https://twitter.com/app4soft/status/1306942884034285568

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24503950

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Re:3270font: A Font for the Nostalgic by rbanffy on Thursday October 01, 2020 @01:36AM (#24647699)

Kind of a web browser in the late 60's ;-)

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Re:3270font: A Font for the Nostalgic by freqshow on Thursday October 01, 2020 @04:41AM (#24648781)

Long ago when I was first trying to understand how web servers worked, that was my first "light bulb" moment. "Oh...it's CICS but with IP addresses instead of port numbers."

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Re:3270font: A Font for the Nostalgic by app4soft on Thursday October 01, 2020 @11:37AM (#24652132)

We may still enjoy Links2[0] browsers in the modern terminals with a 3270font not only on PC, but on Android mobile too![1,2]

> $ links2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24647699

[screenshot] https://i.imgur.com/9quUyEE.png

[0] http://links.twibright.com

[1] https://repology.org/project/links/versions

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16191843

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Re:3270font: A Font for the Nostalgic by rbanffy on Thursday October 01, 2020 @03:37PM (#24655310)

A web browser designed for mainframe 3270 sessions would be a thing of beauty.

Probably easy to port Links. You can't scroll single lines, but can page up/down. Fields should work naturally, but you'd need to select which submit button you are clicking when you press Enter to send the page to the computer.

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Re:3270font: A Font for the Nostalgic by app4soft on Sunday October 04, 2020 @11:08PM (#24684209)

> Fields should work naturally, but you'd need to select which submit button you are clicking when you press Enter

I use Links2 (`links`) ported to Android via Termux.[0,1,2,3]

Links2 (via Termux) + Android (touchscreen input) = <3

@rbanffy, the one more step is left: merge 3270font into `termux-styling/../fonts`![3]

[0] https://search.f-droid.org/?q=termux&lang=en

[1] https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/tree/master/packag...

[2] https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/pull/2317

[3] https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/issues/4973

[3] https://github.com/termux/termux-styling/tree/master/app/src...

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Re:3270font: A Font for the Nostalgic by p_l on Thursday October 01, 2020 @03:40AM (#24648419)

I often use exactly that comparison when describing block terminals to people - you send a page encoded in rather dense markup, and you can use that to implement forms where only user input is returned.

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