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A 3270 Emulator is a terminal emulator that duplicates the functions of an IBM 3270 mainframe computer terminal on a computer, usually a PC or similar microcomputer.
As the original 3270 series terminals were connected to the host computer through a display controller (cluster controller)[a] using coaxial cable, emulators originally required channel (rare), coax or synchronous communication adapter cards to be installed in the PC. Today, many emulators communicate with the mainframe computer through a TN3270 server[b] using the TN3270 (RFC 1576) variant of the Telnet (RFC 495)protocol common on TCP/IP networks including the Internet, so special hardware is no longer required on machines with Internet access. Several vendors offered both coax and communications attached 3270 emulators and TN3270 clients as part of the same product.
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