Amen to both points. I've been doing remote mainframe development since 1200 baud dial-up was state-of-the-art. You need almost no bandwidth at all for 3270. You can refresh an entire 3270 screen with at most 4K or so characters, and ISPF does a pretty clever job of minimizing the number of characters that must actually be sent.
OTOH a millisecond glitch on your connection is nothing for e-mail and almost nothing for Web browsing, but can be a disaster for 3270 over VPN. The new and improved TSO reconnect is a HUGE help. Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of David Betten Sent: Sunday, March 04, 2012 10:25 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Writing article on telework/telecommuting One thing I'll add to that is that if your internet service periodially drops, it's a real pain if you're connected to a host 3270 session. For example, my wife primarally does email and web browsing while working from home. So if our internet signal drops for a few minutes and then comes back, she's not likely to even notice. However, if I'm scrolling through code or a hex dump and the sevice drops for just a few seconds, it's a major headache getting loging back on and hoping my sesson reconnects to where I was. Our latest VPN client seems to offer a bit better recovery from that by maintaining the session but a few years ago it was a major headache for me. > > One experience from teleworking which should appeal to mainframers: By and > large 3270 is the least demanding data stream - so TSO / ISPF goes > fast even on "broadband" as crummy as mine. (It's all the other junk > that runs > really slowly when the wet string dries out.) > > Now I may be in a minority but I bet this counts for lots of people. > > Anyhow, having telecommuted for more than 10 years I'm looking forward > to ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
