Make Mine MAPPER #27 -------------------- by Rob Haeuser Just When You Thought You Knew What You Were Doing... ----------------------------------------------------------------- Focus: PCs. Verdict: Get a big one. Wham-bam, mega-RAM! Hard-disks big enough to track the population of a fair-sized city. Super VGA monitors so sharp and crisp that you can no longer stand to watch your regular TV, which is making the local cable company nervous, considering the fact that if you disconnect, they'll immediately go bankrupt. Then there's all the "available" software. Why do they call it that? As if you could possibly want to buy something that's unavailable. So, whadda we got? DOS 5. Windows 3 something. Heck, let's split the difference and go with anything that's on level 4, know what I mean? Like PC-MAPPER and MAPPER-C. In the meantime, there's all this new PC lingo ya gotta learn. Booting is something I'd like to take literally. Bat files remind me of getting sick from eating too much Halloween candy. But I really have a problem with "mouse driver". It conjures up images of little treadmills spinning under the hood of a go-cart with a grey fuzzy, whiskered guy behind the wheel of the most bizarre entry, ever, in the Indy 500. This is definitely not a term that I can respect. How about "controller" instead of "driver"? We could connect wires to the fuzzy guy's head and plug him into a joy-stick. He would run in the direction you aim the stick and squeak if you hit the fire button. Imagine the fun you could have at parties! Alright, already. I can hear the animal activists now. I wasn't talking about a real mouse, silly. I meant the guy up the hall with the weird hair who has that strange, irritating laugh, you know? Wires coming out of his head would be a definite improvement, especially if they were just above his eyes, seeing as how he doesn't have any eyebrows to speak of. Sorry, only kidding again. It's just that the brave new world of PCs is enough to slightly frazzle any sane person, much less myself. But speaking of mice, maybe they call 'em that because you use 'em to click on all those stupid little pictures named for the big cheese, Charles Icon. I con you not, somebody actually believed me when I told 'em that. Hey, man, icon really is a word. Look it up. Based on the Greek word eikon, meaning likeness or image. Don't you hate it when stuff is actually logical? Don't you just wish everybody was? And who comes up with all those goofy icons anyway? They're usually too small to see, and often have no visual relevance to reality. Plastered all around the borders, lurking in your visual subconscious, they force your eyes into subliminal contortions that all but guarantee the need for glasses you will no doubt purchase from the optometrist up the block whose marquee strangely resembles an icon you just know you've clicked on before. Have you guessed yet that I'm relatively new to the PC world, much less Windows? Yep, a PC illiterate, and proud of it. Sure, I've had one at work for a few years, but it just emulates a UTS60 and ticks me off every time I have to do a two-or-three-key-toggle (good name for a dance: hey, babe, ya wanna do the Texas two-key- toggle?). But, now I have Windows. Aren't I thrilled? Well, kinda. It is a new toy, after all. And, gee, what pretty colors. Speaking of color, it is so much more refreshing than putrid monochrome that I hereby suggest monochrome monitors be banned forever as cruel and unusual punishment, suitable only as operator consoles in the computer room (they need cruel and unusual punishment to keep them awake). Hey! Only kidding, guys! Would you please bring the system back up now? Thank you. Ok, here comes the yin-yang thing. Even though I hate certain aspects of PCs, I love what is beginning to happen: the evolution of the PC from a passive dumb-terminal emulator to an active member of the Data Processing Environment. It seems like such a tremendous waste of talent to have a PC doing nothing but simple emulation. That has near zero impact on the PCs hard-drive, which these days is dang fast and can be unbelievably huge. And the CPU is probably near idle most of the time, bored silly wondering when you're finally gonna figure out how to make it do some real work. The lights are dim. Slowly, the stage rotates, smoke billowing from underneath. A pulsating glow emanates from the center where a circular depression is rising. In the middle, a lone figure huddles over a mysterious glowing object - a terminal. A thunderous murmuring has begun to crescendo, causing the entire arena to vibrate wildly. Suddenly, the lone figure stands erect, looks about as if disoriented, realizes where he is, and says: "Oops, sorry, thought this was the Designer Workbench show." In an instant everything reverses, spinning at blurring speed, collapsing into itself with a quick "vvvwwwip!". Don'cha hate it when that happens? Actually, the demo of MAPPER and Designer Workbench that Unisys has presented at USE conferences did give me a bit of a thrill. The thought of being able to interface with Windows from a mainframe MAPPER is mind-boggling. Let's face it, Windows is the wave. And Designer Workbench (DW) is the glue to the world's most popular GUI. Tying the mainframe directly to the PC, DW opens up a whole new universe of capabilities only dreamed of by many. MAPPER has nearly 20 run functions to interface with DW, including my personal favorites, @PCR (read a file from the PC), @PCW (write a file to the PC), and @PC (run a PC program). @BTN (make a Windows button) is another fun one. Seeing it was one thing, but now that I actually have DW installed and have begun to explore this brave new world, I fear that I am hooked forever. DW installs in Windows in a few minutes, and, sure enough, you get a few new icons and a window. DW is not an emulator, however. INFOConnect is used in this capacity, and is also installed in Windows, complete with icons, etc. As best as I can tell, INFOConnect (IC) comes in a few pieces: a UTS20/40/60 emulator, a graphics package to support UTS60 graphics in Windows, and the Connectivity Services. These three pieces work together to create session scripts, establish sessions, and then emulate terminals. IC can be run independently of DW, and does work with level 35. It looks a good bit like PC MAPPER, but does not interact with Windows quite as well as PC MAPPER does. For example, you can't click on the function key bar with IC. However, when DW enters the picture, the screen takes on a somewhat different look. The function key bar in regular new look is 2-dimensional, but with DW, it becomes a row of 3-D buttons (without numbers, by the way) that visually indent when you click 'em. And, of course, you get all the functionality specific to DW. In about 2 minutes, I wrote a run to download a MAPPER document, invoke WordPerfect already displaying the document, and then upload and display it after I exited WP. And it worked the first time. This is amazing! In essence, every PC becomes a mini-LAN, doing it's own file and comm-serving; doing the rote work most LANs are having a hard time keeping up with. In a nutshell, LANs are obsolete. When you can tie mainframes to PCs, who needs a lousy LAN in the middle, gumming up the works? So get rid of all those old 286s, 'cause DW needs a 386 platform minimum. Donate all of 'em to your local schools, take a tax write-off, and get a bunch of new stuff. After all, there are only 40 shopping days left 'til Christmas! ----------------------------------------------------------------- Rob Haeuser has over 17 years of Data Processing experience. He has been the MAPPER Coordinator for the Texas Department of Human Services since 1983. Covering MAPPER topics ranging from technical to tacky, his never-ending quest is for truth, justice, and the MAPPER way.