Found myself chatting with cpj and uwu on IRC yesterday, and it seems
like I might have committed myself to creating a new gopher
client. uwu reckons that like the jedi building a lightsabre, it's an
important rite of passage for a pubnixer. I kind of see the parallels.

Unfortunately though, I'd just been shooting the mainframe breeze with
cpj (who'd have expected another mainframe guy in c.s?), which meant
that things got rather carried away, and I might be on the hook for a
gopher client in COBOL for MVS. Oops.

Having done a bit of research though, it does in fact look
feasible. IBM COBOL can make calls into the TCP/IP stack[1] (IPv6
example, but you get the idea), so the meat of the thing seems to be
covered. The screen-handling side however will need me to reach into
the guts of the OS via assembler, specifically the TPUT/TGET macros[2]
and related bits. I'm given to understand that the 3270 datastream can
be constructed in COBOL, and then handed off to some small assembler
modules for communication with the terminal device.

With mainframe COBOL, all the terminal I/O handling for business apps
would usually be done via CICS[3] or IMS[4], but starting up a whole
transaction processing subsystem just to access a few phlogs... I
dunno, seems a bit like overkill to me :-)

On the off-chance that some other idiot had already attempted this, I
did some cursory searching of the Large Internet, and found a C-based
client from years back[5]. But to my mind, if you're doing it in C,
you might as well just run the thing under Unix (or USS[6]) and be
done with it. And where's the fun in that, right?

So, here we go. Don't hold your breath.

[1] https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSLTBW_2.1.0/com.ibm.zos.v2r1.hala001/cplipcobol6c.htm
[2] https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSLTBW_2.1.0/com.ibm.zos.v2r1.ikjb600/ikj2k200_Writing_a_Full-Screen_.htm
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CICS
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Information_Management_System
[5] http://sunsite.icm.edu.pl/pub/gopher/mvs/
[6] https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSLTBW_2.2.0/com.ibm.zos.v2r2.bpxa400/toc.htm