john@metavax.UUCP (John Mitchell ) (08/31/88)
I am looking for some pc software that will emulate a 3270 device as well as a vt100, and will perform file transfers between an IBM/PC style machine and a host machine (IBM VM/CMS, IBM MVS/TSO, and DEC VMS). Here is the situation, we have some existing software for the PC, and some existing software that runs on mainframe machines. We would like to provide an interface for our customers between the PC and mainframe software. Currently our PC software generates "transfer" files which the client uploads to the mainframe outside of our software, our mainframe software then accepts the "transfer" files as input. We would like for this process to be much more transparent to the client. Ideally, we would like to write some software on the PC that "knows" about our mainframe software. This PC software would get requests from the client, perform some checking on the requests, translate the requests to something that the mainframe will understand, send the request to the mainframe, and return the results to the PC. What we need, is a PC product, with a programmer interface from C, that will be the buffer between our PC and mainframe software. Our PC software would call it with requests like "get this mainframe file" or "send this message to the mainframe", again ideally this same interface should be usable whether the mainframe is an IBM or a DEC or even a UNIX machine. This may require software on the mainframe side to handle that end of the file transfer. It may also require more than one product to handle the different mainframe protocols. Now for the kicker, we would be willing to pay for such a product. If you know of any products currently on the market that sound like they might do the job, if I'm thinking about this on too simple of a level and am missing some major ramifications, if you've tried something like this before with either success or failure, please send me e-mail. I am not a regular reader of this group. I'll summarize if requested and enough info is available to summarize. -- If it happens, then it must be possible!