- published: 11 Aug 2016
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The IBM 3270 is a class of block oriented computer terminal (sometimes called display devices) introduced by IBM in 1971 normally used to communicate with IBM mainframes. The 3270 was the successor to the IBM 2260 display terminal. Due to the text colour on the original models, these terminals are informally known as green screen terminals. Unlike a character-oriented terminal, the 3270 minimizes the number of I/O interrupts required by transferring large blocks of data known as data streams, and uses a high speed proprietary communications interface, using coaxial cable.
Although IBM no longer manufactures 3270 terminals, the IBM 3270 protocol is still commonly used via terminal emulation to access mainframe-based applications. Accordingly, such applications are sometimes referred to as green screen applications. The use of 3270 is slowly diminishing as more and more mainframe applications acquire Web interfaces, although some Web applications merely use the technique of "screen scraping" to capture old screens and transfer the data to modern front-ends.