Re: lynx-dev OS-400 Version of Lynx? (fwd)

[pg]

In a recent note, address@hidden said:

> Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 11:56:07 -0400 (EDT)
> 
> Is OS-400 anything like OS-390?  one of the developers has made changes
> to lynx over the past several months to accommodate that system.
>  
> > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- 
> > Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 13:07:26 -0500  
> > From: "Laimins, Eric" <address@hidden> 
> >  
> > Out of curiosity, has anyone ever ported Lynx to OS-400?  We are looking 
> > for a way to get a text only browser to dumb-terminals attached to an 
> > AS/400... 
> >  
> > Essentially, we need to give insurance companies access to our web-site. 
> > This poses a problem given the fact that the insurance industry is 
> > running a series of legacy mainframe/mid-range machines.  Many of them 
> > are running MVS (which makes Lynx attractive for our use), but many are 
> > running OS/400.  Since most (if not all) of these companies are 
> > terrified of the cost of putting a PC on everyone's desk, we need a text 
> > only OS/400 browser.  Do you have any ideas?  Would porting Lynx to this 
> > platform pose any significant problem based on your experience?  Is 
> > there another browser out there that we could use? 
> >  
I believe OS-400 is similar to OS/390 only in using EBCDIC rather than
ASCII.  But the EBCDIC support is present in recent development versions of
Lynx (not the "stable" 2.8.1rel2).  It still depends on a curses library,
which is now available for OS/390.  But this depends on what you mean
by a "dumb-terminal".  On OS/390, Lynx requires an Xterm, vt100 or the
like (connected via telnet or rlogin); a 3270 is not supported.
Rule of thumb: if vi or emacs works, Lynx probably will; otherwise
probably not.

I also understand OS-400 suffers a 6.3 single-case file naming restriction.
Lynx has been ported to systems with 8.3 single-case file names; 6.3
may be harder.  (Offhand, I think of LYMain.c and LYMainLoop.c, which
become ambiguous at 6.3).

-- gil