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Building an IBM 3270 terminal controller
I wanted to connect an IBM 3270 mainframe terminal to the Hercules emulator but couldn't find a working controller. So I decided to build my own.
Once personal computers became commonplace, terminals could be replaced with ISA, PCMCIA, and later PCI cards that allowed a PC running an emulator to connect using the same coax cable. Extracting the addresses was easy, but I did not see the data written to the display buffer in the EBCDIC encoding that I expected based on the diagnosis interface shown on the terminal, it wasn't ASCII either. Instead, the CUT terminal provides commands to read from the display buffer and to find cells matching a particular pattern, such as an attribute indicating the start of an unprotected field.
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