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From 1997 to 1999 I had a contract with Caterpillar. Dealers used an AS/400 application called Service Advisor via good old-fashioned 5250 terminals [0]. For those not born when reality was rendered in shades of green, a real 5250 terminal weighed close to 85 pounds (including keyboard) and was built to withstand armed invasion (only partially joking). They were rugged. All IBM hardware of that era was durable. Caterpillar dealers fix large earthmoving equipment and the users of this application were mechanics and other shop staff. Grease, oil, diesel fuel, and any other kind of grime you can imagine were slathered over these terminals. They still worked. No mouse. No GUI. As is the case with most "green screen" applications, users had a mental map of every panel and could "type ahead" several screens and would do so routinely. It was decided that this application would be "modernized". Y2K hysteria was ramping up and the nascent dotcom boom was brewing. I lost count of how many times I heard, "We need to put some lipstick on this pig." The new hotness was Java and applets. Yes, you read that correctly: the new front-end was going to be written in Java and deployed as applets. The AS/400 would remain as the back-end. For a period of time DCE [1] plus C and C++ shims (running on the AS/400) glued the Java front-end to the back-end. The project did get "completed" but in name only. Dealers hated the new interface: it was slow, it required a mouse, it did not support any kind of type-ahead, and PC equipment wasn't designed for such a brutal environment. My last interface with these systems was in in 2001 for a very short follow-up project. At that time the green screen was still ruling the roost. Perhaps they eventually did kill off the AS/400 and all of the COBOL. Nah, probably not. The AS/400 wasn't then (and isn't now) sexy. Green screen applications aren't sexy. COBOL, RPG, and other IBM-centric technologies like CICS [2] aren't sexy. That doesn't mean they don't work. Ironically, they tend to work too well. This is but one example from oh so many over the years. Sometimes, very rarely, an old technology truly requires complete replacement. Often, calling something legacy is used as cover to cargo cult and "keep up with the neighbors". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_5250 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCE/RPC [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CICS EDITED: formatting |