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I work for a company that has been using the TinyTERM Terminal Emulator for at least 20 years now. Here is a link to the program's description:

http://www.centurysoftware.com/products/tinyterm-terminal-emulator.php

It basically is a way for employees to pull up past invoices and reports and is used company wide (main office and thirty satellite locations).

Every time I look at it I can't help but think that it's wildly antiquated and with technology today there has to be a more elegant program that's been designed. It's a program that's completely text based.

Does anyone know of any modern examples of this style of program? One with more image based and intuitive features would be preferred as our IT department has to help so many new employees (and existing employees) learn the system and it's features, but any newer program will do for now as I am just in the research phase.

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The problem is that your application is TTY-oriented. You're not going to be able to improve things much without redoing the application side. (Though probably there are TTY terminal programs that at least use nice fonts, and black on white.) – Daniel R Hicks Jan 6 '12 at 20:44
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TinyTERM is a terminal emulator and all it does is connect to some remote server. It does not by itself handle your invoices and reports; that is done by some other program. – grawity Jan 6 '12 at 20:48
Oh ok, I see. As you can see I'm just beginning to learn how these systems work, this is a good start to understanding it, thank you! – MxmastaMills Jan 7 '12 at 16:49
I've looked further into this within the company and TinyTERM is emulated a Telnet connection and just connecting to our local server that stores our invoices and reports. There's no other program handling the reports (or organizing them), it's just connected straight to it and grabbing the information. I'm basically looking for some sort of program that can more easily and intuitively do this. Does anyone know of any (I can't seem to find what I'm looking for)? – MxmastaMills Jan 9 '12 at 20:09

2 Answers

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Terminal Emulators

Alternatives include Putty, SecureCRT, Reflection and others. These won't significantly change the way the underlying application looks.

Screen Scrapers

You may be looking for a program that wil interact with your legacy application in the background and present a GUI interface to the users. Search for screen scraper. Examples might include this This could require a fairly major amount of work and cost.

GUI conversion

Some legacy applications are written in 4GL languages which now have a GUI version. Example. If you have access to the source code for the legacy application then it may be possible to convert it. Again this can involve considerable effort and cost. Some claim it can be relatively simple.

Replacement for file-viewing

If your terminal emulator is used to "pull up past invoices and reports" that are basically text files (or could be exported as such), it may be relatively easy to install a web-server and make those documents available through a web-browser

Replacing a complicated legacy app

If the legacy app is a transactional accounting system, replacing it with an existing but different commercial "modern" GUI application may be a major project.

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Great, thank you so much. This will give me a good start when it comes to asking questions about the system used around the office. I was kinda thrown into this project so I'm just now learning about these style of programs. – MxmastaMills Jan 7 '12 at 16:50
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I suggest checking out WinSCP for transfering files remotely. It has a GUI and is relatively easy to use (drag and drop). For command-line sessions you should be using PuTTY - it is one of the best clients out there.

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