Copying All Data Off An Old Mainframe

[zunebuggy]

I hope I picked the right section.

Oops I meant to post this in System Programming. I hope that's the right section. I do not see an option to move it.

We have a mainframe at work that contains an archive of old records. 1990s and before.

I have been tasked with getting the data off the Mainframe so that it can be retired.

We interface the Mainframe with a GUI (for Windows) application called Jolly Giant WIRE. I have 4 phases of data collection from this mainframe.

I chose to use Excel VBA to search and screen-scrape the data. This worked OK for Phase 1 and after several months, it was completed. Now I am on Phase 2 and it is much larger and slower. For each account I look up, I have to capture Notes and there are anywhere from 1 to hundreds of notes for each account.

I have tried to find an API for the Mainframe or for Jolly Giant WIRE to make this task faster. We just do not have anyone with real Mainframe knowledge and I am an old VB developer.

I can get VB.Net if necessary, but can somebody just please tell me an easy way to capture the data on this Mainframe and save it, preferably into a text format (with any delimiter) or an SQL file?

Thank you for any help.
Zunebuggy