The method of retrieval would depend entirely upon what communication
protocols you have in place between the PC and the mainframe. You
should review the documentation for them -- that should give you a
good idea on how to do it.

You haven't told us what the mainframe system  is called, or even the brand
of computer it runs on, so how could we possibly answer this?

Anyway ... talk to the maker of the mainframe system and also ask your
question on any user forums they have.

Simple rule of thumb - ask the users/maker of the lesser-known product about
the possibilities of connection to the universally-known product - not the
other way around.

With a mainframe, your choice is limited. Usually it is an FTP to a text
file. The internal format will be tab or coma delimited (or if you are old
school, fixed width fields)



The FTP will take care of the conversion from EBCDIC to ASCII.



Some terminal emulators also include a file  transfer mechanism. SAG's Entire
Connection (a Adabas/Natural environment) will transfer a file in Excel
format.

Talk to the section of your IT department that is responsible for the
mainframe. They should have procedures for FTPing information from the
mainframe to a text file  on the LAN. Depending on the mainframe software,
the terminal emulator may have the capability of transferring files from the
mainframe.



Though mainframes have common features, the actual applications are varied
and the method of transferring information are also varied. The only ones
who would know for sure are the ones actually running the mainframe.



Politically, mainframes are far more compartmentized and security conscious
than a LAN and though you may be able to take a USB to a friend's PC, you
will run into a wall of procedures if you try to do that on a mainframe. You
may run into a lot of "Not my department".

As I said before, the method will depend entirely on what mechanism
you have in place to communicate between the mainframe and the PC.
There are a number  of different products that provide that
functionality and each would have their own protocols that need to be
used. You would be best off referring to the documentation for that
product.

When I implemented this for our systems, we had two different methods
available to us.

No one will be able to help you unless you can specify things like:

-- What kind of mainframe you're getting the data  from
-- What kind of PC/servers you have
-- What communication protocols are in place
-- How your system  programmers installed the communication software
-- What security firewalls and other options they have decided to go with

...etc, etc

You'd be best off contacting your own system programmers. They should
have those details and be able to tell you how to do what you need to
do. *IF* you can at all!