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You can have one running in a terminal on your computer :)

Hercules Project
Emulates a 360/370/390 series system.

Even so, I'm glad it finally came up; I just added it to the Hercules home page, as well.

The page for the port says it's being done on Hercules, which is a System/390 and z/Architecture simulator; the Hercules page claims it runs on Linux and 32-bit Windows, but it can probably be made to run on UNIXes other than Linux as well, assuming it doesn't Just Work out of the box.

IEA218I MOD=158, ALTSYS=350 ASSUMED S370
IEA101A SPECIFY SYSTEM PARAMETERS FOR RELEASE

IEE140I SYSTEM CONSOLES
CONSOLE/ALT COND AUTH AREA ROUTCD
30E/01F H STCMDS 03 ALL
01F/31F M ALL 01 ALL
31F/01F N ALL 02 ALL
30E/01F A NONE 03 ALL

IEE101A READY
IEF249I FOLLOWING P/R AND RSV VOLUMES ARE MOUNTED
SYSRES ON 150 (RSV-STR)
WORK01 ON 151 (RSV-PUB)
MVTRES ON 350 (P/R-PRV)
DLIB01 ON 351 (RSV-PRV)
WORK02 ON 352 (RSV-PUB)
IEE103I S WTR,00E *
IEE103I S RDR,00C *
IEE103I S INIT *

*00 IEE116A TOD CLOCK INVALID- REPLY WITH SET PARAMETERS
r 0,'date=72.045'

IEE600I REPLY TO 00 IS; 'date=72.045'
IEE118I SET PARAMETER(S) ACCEPTED
IEE037I LOG NOT SUPPORTED.
*01 IEC123D 00E SPECIFY UCS PARAMETER
*IEA000A 00A,INT REQ,02,0E00,4000,,,RDR
r 1,pn

IEE600I REPLY TO 01 IS; PN
mn status
mn jobnames,t

IEF403I INIT STARTED TIME=01.32.11
IEF429I INITIATOR 'INIT' WAITING FOR WORK

d a
IEE102I 01.33.30 ACTIVE DISPLAY 072
STRADDR ENDADDR SQA R SUBT NAME1 NAME2 NAME3
02022K 02048K 01728 02 MASTER SCHEDULER
02002K 02022K 00392 00 WTR 00E
00000K 00000K 00504 00 INIT

You've mentioned Hercules in your column a couple of times, both quite favorably. Thanks!

One industry analyst from Germany has claimed repeatedly that IBM is getting ready to slap down Hercules with its lawyers, on the basis of some unspecified violations of their intellectual property rights. He's said that it's not just patent infringement, but refuses to go into exactly what else.

What effect would you think that taking such an action would have on IBM once the open source community finds out?

There already is a S/390 emulator... now all you need is the OS... or you could be daring and try Linux on it.

This might be useful: hercules it is an open-source project to produce a 390 simulator for linux and other operating systems.. Seems to be up and working... now you can have your own virtual mainframe on your desktop :)

Why not do what Moshe Bar did and run Linux S/390 on a PC using Hercules? Sure the IBM site certainly has more resources, but if it's to just periodically recompile/test a few programs, it may not be too bad to do it on your own hardware. I suppose it could also be a good reason if you are developing a closed source program and are paranoid about having the source on another company's site.

Case in point: I have a page which describes my rotten experiences with the Ford Motor Company and a 1992 Explorer, at http://www.conmicro.cx/explorer.html. I didn't go out and register fordsucks.com, even though I could have in 1994 when I had the problem. Guess what? People have no trouble finding the page anyway.

Every once in a while someting stirs these old memories and it makes my brain hurt. I once had an ISPF display in a window on the same desktop with some Java source code in another window and my ears started to bleed.

Well, you can now have your very own MVS system on the same desktop as your web browser...Check out Hercules.

Here is what I did when I got fed up with the junk that passes for computing these days. Get the Hercules IBM 360/370 emulator from here, VM/370 from here or MVS from here and go back to the days of using a real computer!

One of the reasons I'm heavily involved with the Hercules IBM mainframe emulator is that it's not licensed under the GPV

There's room in the Open Source movement for lots of different licenses.

You arguments against the GPL have much in common with Microsoft's; including that they are mostly FUD. This helps Microsoft, not Open Source.

One thing I asked for, and got, was an exemption in the standard "all your work are belong to us" employment agreement for work on open-source projects that isn't strictly related to GMI's business. A similar clause should be added to every employment agreement, IMAO, and doing that for these hires would make your company a lot more attractive to an open-source developer, because it removes any doubt that they could have legal problems later from continuing to work on the things that brought them to your attention in the first place.
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Thanks for an informative article...

2.) CPU clustering. I believe OS/390 could only have a maximum of 16 CPUs. I've heard that z/OS can have up to 64.

Yes, I think this is correct (though I haven't looked at the zPOO myself). This isn't a cluster, though (that term more properly applies to a Parallel Sysplex), but rather a single multiprocessor system.

3.) IBM is going trying to force the n-3 upgrade restriction again. Basically IBM releases a new version of the OS every 6 months. If you keep current on maintenance they will assist in an upgrade from any version 3 levels old. For example, if you are going to OS/390 R10 they will help if your current version is R7 or later. IBM always pushed this but Y2K made them make this a strong recomendation rather than a requirement. This is still going to be a tough sell because most companies don't like doing OS upgrades every 2 years.

Actually, I believe IBM relaxed that restriction for r10 to allow coexistence back to r6.

The bigger news here is that if you run z/OS on a 2064 (the 64-bit hardware), you *must* run it in 64-bit mode, as a licensing restriction, unless you get a special dispensation - and special code - from IBM. That means that shops who want to upgrade to 64 bits have a choice: either buy a 2064 as the first step in the migration, and migrate from OS/390 to z/OS later, or else upgrade to running in 64-bit mode the moment their 2064 hits the floor. I know of no mainframe shop which would choose the latter.

One other note: While Amdahl and Hitachi have bailed on the idea of producing a z/Architecture system, the folks who really do the work on Hercules are undaunted...Hercules supports 64-bit mode (though it's still a work in progress). Hopefully, before much longer, IBM will allow hobbyist licensing of z/OS, and some of the naysayers here will be able to see for themselves its true strengths and weaknesses.
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Controlling DNS' is like telling you what street you can stand on to give your speech.... If all the good streets (recognized and traveled by most people) are owned by major corporations then your right to speech is effectively denied.

It is critically important to be able to register your own domain name. Even if every web visitor finds your page from a search engine, if your speach offends someone with clout, all they have to do is threaten whomever is nice enough to host your pages under their domain name. You get censored very easily.

In the present example, you are unhappy with GM and create a GM-sucks page, and of course being a free-speech example, someone (probably with GM) doesn't like the page. You're not going to be an easy target, but whoever has been nice enough to host your page under their domain name probably is. Afterall, they're a business (in the theoritical world of corporate-only well-known TLDs), and your page isn't in their mission, and even one cease-and-desist letter with words like "confusingly similar to our regsitered trademark" is going to make the decision to stop helping you a no-brainer.

If you don't have your own domain name, you're screwed. All those links and bookmarks to your old URL now dead. Eventually the serach engines will index your page at the new site, but old links continue to propagate for a damn long time. My site was once hosted at a university web site, for about 3-4 years, and hundreds of links were made and all the search engines indexed it. Now, nearly 2 years after the move, still about 2000 hits/month (about 10-15% of my traffic) comes from a redirect that the old site was nice enough to leave in place, despite many all-night sessions resubmitting to all the major search engines and emailing to hundreds of web masters (often times taking considerable time to find out who's responsible for a page with the link). It is very important to have your own domain name.

It will take quite some time before your speech is as effective as before, and in a world where the only well-known domain names pander to corporate interests, you'll have to choose between registering a domain name that labels your page as having no valuable content, or hosting on someone else's site.

Jay, while your domain name is a .cx, it appears that you effectively control this domain name, which is a very different scenario that using "someisp.com/~you/gmsucks", where the ISP is an easy target for a trademark complain or other attempt at censorship, leaving the disgruntled consumer without the option to change the hosting to another ISP that will not be as easily pushed around.

Now, honestly, I'm not sure if this whole ICANN/ALCU thing really is a problem that will turn into corporate control of domain names.... the reason I posted this, and I hope it was clear, is that if you're going to publish anything significant on the web, you need to be able to register your own domain name. Suggesting that others will find your site from search engines and not by remembering your name is only significant until the hosting under someone else's name ends and many links, bookmarks and stored search engine result all stop working.

In a world where people find content via search engines, the actual domain name that content is at is its least important feature. If you've got someething to say - or even if you don't - people will find you.
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IBM is trying real hard to gain mindshare for the S/390. Putting Linux on it is a major step in that direction: How many of you thought of the S/390 as a practical Linux platform?

There's one thing that IBM can do that would help both the Linux community and itself: Hobbyist licensing for its mainframe OSes. Very few folks would ever run a single Linux image on a 390. By far and away, they'd use the VM/ESA operating system, which allows multiple virtual machines on one physical one, or VIF, a cut-down VM intended for hosting multiple Linuxes. Unfortunately, a VM/ESA license costs about $25K on the smallest machine, going up from there. (I don't know how much VIF will cost.)

Before you say, "But no hobbyist will run their own S/390!", I'll point out that the Hercules S/390 emulator will run VM/ESA just fine. Now that running an S/390 is within reach of the hobbyist, IBM would gain a lot of mindshare by letting hobbyists run real configurations on their Linux boxes and get familiar with how it all goes together.
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These guys have created IBM 370 and 390 emulators that will let you run IBM Mainframe operating systems under Linux! Apparently the original OS/360 operating system is (somehow) in the public domain, and you hand download all of this and IPL your own Mainframe from virtual DASD and run JCL, TSO, etc. The OS/360 download comes with COBOL, PL/I, RPG, and FORTRAN compilers among other things. Quite a kick.

What, exactly, does the gcc team mean by "binaries won't be compatible"? Will an RPM built on a RH 6.2 system run on an RH 7 one, and vice versa? How about other distributions?

I'm as happy as the next guy to see progress being made on gcc - I've spent more time than anyone should on chasing down optimizer bugs - but if it breaks things in a major way, this is a Bad Idea.
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• The Hercules System/370 and ESA/390 Emulator
  Hercules is a System/370 and ESA/390 emulator which can IPL and execute S/370 and ESA/390 instructions. It can also emulate CKD and FBA DASD, printer, card reader, tape, channel-to-channel adapter, and local non-SNA 3270 devices

So, for some REAL nostalgia, install this on your box, get OS/360 (freeware!), and before you know it you'll be running TSO with 5 users, each pecking away at their 3270 block-mode terminals. Oh, and it can also run Linux/390, so if you've got way too much time on your hand you can run Linux->Hercules->Linux/390->Hercules->OS/360 or something horrible like that.