Question

We have an Informix 4GL forms interface to our database, accessed using a terminal emulator running in WY-60 or “Wyse-60” terminal emulation mode.

From what I’m reading, where I would previously understood a “terminal” to just be a display of a text stream (e.g. Hyperterm), “WY-60” mode means that the software is emulating a 1980s-era computer, which is performing display operations based on the data sent within the text stream, resulting in a high degree (for the time) of graphical capability with only a very small expenditure of data traffic.

What I’m wondering is, what alternatives do I have to this in 4GL Informix?

The menu-driven interface of the 4GL forms will presumably require something better than a pure text-stream terminal… but how much work would it be to change from our current, proprietary (requiring expensive terminal emulation software) WY-60 type display to something else which could, for instance, work with the free PuTTY terminal software?

Answer 1

There are all sorts of things to discuss here, but the basic answer is:

• Change the setting of the TERM environment variable to a different value from wy-60.

What are the issues:

1. You need to know whether you are using termcap or terminfo. This is controlled by the INFORMIXTERM environment variable, which can be set to termcap or terminfo or could be unset in which case it defaults to termcap.
2. You need to know where your alternative terminal description will come from.
   • If you are using termcap, you will need to ensure that the TERMCAP variable is set correctly, either to the name of file (default is /etc/termcap; Informix provides a file in $INFORMIXDIR/etc/termcap) or the text of the entry for the terminal.
   • If you are using terminfo, you can specify where the terminal entries are stored in the TERMINFO environment variable. It will be a directory name; under that will be a series of directories each with a single character name (the first character of a terminal name), with the actual terminal descriptions in a file. Thus, if TERMINFO=$HOME/terminfo and TERM=wy-60, the terminfo code will look for the file $HOME/terminfo/w/wy-60.
3. You need to be sure that the relevant description for your new terminal is available. You can use any terminal type that is described by termcap or terminfo. However, Informix does use some extra capabilities (documented in an appendix to the I4GL Reference Manual) under termcap.
4. You’ll need to check that the I4GL program looks clean on your new terminal type.

You might look at xterm or xterm-color or ansi or vt100 or any of a large number of other terminal types. The only reason to stay with Wyse 60 is that it is known to work.