Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!hao!gatech!udel!burdvax!bpa!cbmvax!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!hedrick From: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: Re: TN3270 on Terminal Servers Message-ID: Date: 12 Mar 88 22:46:18 GMT References: <8803050302.AA02026@ACC-SB-UNIX.ARPA> Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 18 To: chris@ACC-SB-UNIX.ARPA I know at least one vendor who claims to be working on tn3270 mode. I think I can tell you why it hasn't been done yet. First, it needs more memory and CPU than a normal telnet connection. You have to maintain a screen image and various other state information, and you have to do the emulation. Most terminal servers currently use a 68000 with not much memory. But that's not the big problem. The big problem is that you need to have access to somthing like termcap for the user's terminal. Terminal servers don't have disks, and they don't have enough memory to store the whole thing in memory. My theory is that they're going to have to define a "termcap server" that runs on a host and gives you the termcap entry for a single requested terminal type. Of course those machines that support tftp booting (which I think is common) could always download /etc/termcap and just throw away everything except the one entry that they needed. Presumably when the vendors do it, they'll use it to help sell us upgrades that use the SPARC chip and have 32MB of memory... (Well, not really, but I think you might need more than 1MB, and at least a 68020.)