Block mode terminals are somewhat similar to the forms based UIs we later got like HTML.

The 3290 was like a 4 split tmux session, it is such a beautiful device (https://ifdesign.com/en/winner-ranking/project/ibm-3290-info...). Perfect keyboard, plasma contrast and the right text color for long sessions. My understanding is they outlived themselves with long service in air traffic control (supplementing vector/raster displays), financial markets, and software development. Once upon a time people seemed to really care about doing things well.

Articles like this always paint a rosy picture of the 3270 but consider the limitations. Async style updates as commonly found on a VT designed program were tricky.

Now admittedly my own experience with the 3270 was through about three layers of obtuse IBM operating systems. Perhaps if I sat down with a 3270 and a bare OS I would consider them differently, but I always found them terribly limiting compared to a VT. More efficient sure, but much harder/impossible to do cool stuff on.

source: I was a night shift tape monkey for a IBM place for a few years. A fair amount of down time, access to a full set of manuals and an understanding boss meant I was doing more hacking on production mainframes than I probably should have been.

Hey, based on the picture, I used one of those 3179 models for about 6-7 years until my company replaced it with a desktop PC running terminal emulation software.

Years later, probably around 2003, when desktop apps started getting replaced by web apps (at least at my job), I remember making that connection between web browsers and 3270s. In the 1990s, clients got very fat (think powerbuilder), but then in the late 1990s and early 2000s much of the fat went to the server-side and the web browser became the thin(ish) client. The web browser was sort of acting as a block device (like the 3270) in the sense that the end-user filled data into fields and then sent the whole thing at once by hitting some button.

With Web 2.0, the client started to put on weight again. Then with mobile apps, the fat client was back, baby! It just keeps cycling.

The IBM 3270 display family was amazing for its time - a character-oriented, block-mode terminal that supported light pens and APL keyboards in the '70s, as well as color graphics and a plasma display that supported four 80x24 logical screens in the early 80's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3270

Despite all the years using their services I had no idea RS has a tech blog!

I used to use 3270-based stuff at IBM back in the mid-2000s, when I did tech support for their EPOS systems.

They had some hyper janky Windows XP Citrix client that ran 3270 terminals that kind of half-worked on some server somewhere, that then talked to the Big Iron. When it didn't work (it frequently didn't) it meant we got a lot of coffee breaks, so not the worst in the world.

Reminder that the X11 based x3270 client can be used to communicate with mainframes, including the "Hercules" IBM mainframe emulator that you can run on Linux/Windows/MacOS .