Depends on the job. I've seen some very unfortunate PC deployments (most in the 90s) that axed perfectly good 3270-based systems in favor of clunky, crash-prone, button-and-wizard GUIs that were so bad, employees had to go back to paper-based workflows to get their jobs done.

Terminal-based systems often have a very steep learning curve, but I've seen many cases where they were better designed and met business needs better than COTS replacements.

Granted, those terminal-based systems were probably phenomenally expensive when they were put in (mostly in the 70s or early 80s, that I saw), and I suppose it's possible that after 15-20 years we have a biased sample that only represents the best of the breed, but they got the job done.

Did you try both? Can you work better on your internet-hooked box?

Can I get a green-screen terminal hooked up to the Internet?

If by "green screen" you mean 3270 terminal, then ... yes, but it would be pretty hard. The networking hardware for a 3270 is pretty expensive. (I was going to say "getting pretty expensive," but in reality SNA has always been expensive; it's just that other networking hardware has gotten dirt cheap by comparison.) And, of course, you need some sort of actual backend computer to attach the terminal to.

But sure, if you had a terminal, a spare IBM system (the iSeries is probably the lowest end) set up to support SNA, and then a networking controller to attach the 3270 to, you could probably get Lynx working.

Alternately, if you just want the effect, you could just pick up an old green/black monochrome display and hook it up (via a physical adapter) to any VGA card. Buggy implementations excepted, all VGA cards should be backwards-compatible to MGA.

Add a nice IBM Model M keyboard and you'd be all set. I suspect someone has probably done this as a case mod before (if not ... I might); stick a modern mobo in an old IBM PC case with the original monitor and keyboard.

Yes. Find any of a number of old-school serial terminals, attach to the serial port on a PC running linux, voila!

http://vt100.net/

You forgot the third choice: using pen and paper. I'll take the pen+paper and the occassional green-screen.

Agreed. (Though I still have my terminal set to green-on-black.)