TN5250 Terminal Emulator

ZOC Terminal is a professional and feature-rich TN5250 terminal emulator which lets you access IBM iSeries and zSeries mainframes via normal or secure (SSL) telnet connections.


TN5250-related features:
  • Communication: Telnet (TN5250) and TN5250-SSL
  • Ctrl-keys mappable as reset/transmit/enter
  • Full keyboard remapping with 5250-specific keys
  • Also supports IBM TN3270

Other features:
  • Multiple sessions in a tabbed window
  • Secure data transfer via SSL
  • Scripting and recording of 5250 sessions
  • Other Emulations: TN3270, xterm, VT220, VT420, Wyse, QNX
  • Powerful scripting language with screen-scrape ability
  • Small memory footprint (RAM and hard drive)
  • Administrator-friendly with easy deployment
More...
Glossary:

TN5250 Terminal Emulator

Overview: TN5250 is a terminal emulation standard developed by IBM to access iSeries servers. These are midrange servers which are mainly used by businesses for large-scale data processing. They can be used by thousands of users at the same time, but they need to be accessed through so-called terminals. In the past true IBM 5250 terminals were often used for this purpose, but with the advent of personal computing the use of terminal emulation software like ZOC (on a computer running Windows or macOS) became the norm for TN5250 access, because it is considerably more cost-effective than using genuine IBM terminals.

What is an IBM 5250 (TN5250)?

Six years after the 3270 terminal, IBM introduced the 5250 terminal as a block-oriented computer terminal (sometimes called a display device) to communicate with IBM midrange servers. Unlike character-oriented terminals like VT220 or ANSI, the 5250 minimizes the number of I/O operations required to transfer large blocks of data known as data streams, but requires more computing power inside the terminal itself to handle the complexity of the TN5250 protocol. The IBM 5250 terminal is similar to the 3270 terminal, but less complex.

The 5250 series was designed to connect with IBM AS/400 midrange computers (later called iSeries), often at a remote location, using the technology then available at the time. A major design goal of the 5250s is minimizing the amount of data transmitted (data links were often via 9600 bps modems). In a data stream, both text and control (or formatting functions) are interspersed allowing an entire screen to be "drawn" as a single output operation via Token Ring network.

Although IBM no longer manufactures 5250 terminals, the IBM 5250 protocol is still commonly used via terminal emulation to access iSeries-based applications, especially in mid-sized organizations and companies.

Since Token Ring networks are no longer in use these days, today TCP/Telnet is mostly used as a transport, hence the emulation is now also often named in conjunction with the Telnet transport and called TN5250.

ZOC Terminal: Modern TN5250 Emulation

Because of the complexity and because of some arcane features of the TN5250 protocol, most standard Linux/Unix oriented telnet clients can't be used to emulate TN5250 terminals.

ZOC however offers an industrial-strength implementation which matches the stability and features of IBM's own TN5250 emulator at a fraction of the price and thus lets you access IBM iSeries servers via a telnet or SSL connection using the TN5250 emulations (remote login protocols that make it possible to emulate IBM's two terminals).

The ZOC TN5250 Telnet Client includes a number of powerful features. It is highly configurable and includes common terminal features such as full keyboard redefinition and user-defined on-screen buttons.

It also offers some very advanced and unique features such as a powerful scripting language and automatic triggering of actions based on received or typed text. Besides that, the ZOC Terminal also supports common emulations like vt102, vt220, Wyse, TVI, and Sun's CDE as well as IND$FILE file transfer.

ZOC Terminal Download

Read more about our ZOC Terminal Emulator, check its feature list, look at our screenshots or start your free 30 days of evaluation today and download ZOC Terminal V9.04.5 now.

DOWNLOAD
ZOC for Windows (32-bit)