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From: bzs@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: net.mail
Subject: Re: uucp on IBM mainframe ?!
Message-ID: <1097@bu-cs.bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: Fri, 22-Aug-86 12:42:06 EDT
Article-I.D.: bu-cs.1097
Posted: Fri Aug 22 12:42:06 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 22-Aug-86 21:56:39 EDT
Organization: Boston U. Comp. Sci.
Lines: 47


>Pardon?  Check out a machine called the 7171, it enables standard ASCII
>terminals to talk straight to IBM systems.  If you don't have that you
>can use an async port on the IBM to talk ASCII, you just have to write
>the driver for it, but is can be done.  Its not easy, but it can be done.
>Kenneth Ng:

C'mon Ken. There's a little more to getting UUCP up on an IBM Mainframe
than locating an ASCII port.

Besides, the 7171 does 327x protocol emulation (unless, perhaps,
you do a lot of magic to supress it.) That would be like trying to
do UUCP into a port running a shell under emacs.

I agree that some 3705 type ascii line would be a place to start, but
I've written that program (not UUCP though, a dedicated program to do
print spooling between UNIX and an IBM mainframe, don't ask for it,
we run our own O/S on our IBM, but that doesn't affect this discussion.)
The main problem is that the 370x lines are half-duplex and will not
listen to you unless they are ready to (and not always then, they
really act up if they get an overrun.) You need a real lock-step
protocol that knows a fair amount about their behavior and turn-around
characteristics.

However, people have gotten Kermit to work on both 370x and 7171s
which might be a place to look for inspiration.

Of course, then you would need UUCP. Which means you'd need a compatible
C compiler if you were to port it. Which means you'd need emulation
support for all the UNIX system calls, or to rewrite all that.

Which means that if you don't have any of that it might be cheaper to
get either IX/370 or Amdahl's UTS, easier also. It might not be cheaper,
depends on what additional hardware you might need to run UNIX.

Unfortunately, the person said MVS. Most MVS shops don't run VM and
probably wouldn't (although MVS will run under VM, it costs a few
percent of the machine and I believe XA support and SNA is just
becoming available.) UTS runs on the bare machine, but that would
preclude running MVS, so save your breath, I doubt they would do
that.

Oh well, there are possible solutions, but none are trivial. One
of the solutions is, don't bother, go get the right machine and
let the IBM do what it's good at; searching massive data bases.

	-Barry Shein, Boston University