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Obtaining Mainframe Experience w/o a Mainframe?
Nice2Cats asks: "So I'm reading all over about how companies are desperate for people who know how to work mainframes, especially now that IBM is shipping them with Linux. But how -- short of a course with Big Blue or some other exercise in expensive formal education -- can I acquire even the most basic information or experience with big iron? There doesn't seem to be many tutorials or introductions online; what would be nice, but I can't seem to find either, would be a simulator that would run on a PC. All I want to know is if I like enough to be seriously interested."
yet excellent page on just this topic. :)
HERE
Hope this helps!
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
Hercules was created by Roger Bowler and is maintained by Jay Maynard. Jan Jaeger designed and implemented many of the advanced features of Hercules, including dynamic reconfiguration, integrated console, interpretive execution and z/Architecture support.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
At least, that's the theory. After doing a fair amount of mainframe work, mostly with VM/CMS, I got to the point where the extreme weirdness of the environment was kind of cool in a retro sort of way, and I began to get a sense of how it all fit together. But this is not something you're going to pick up from a tutorial on the Internet.
:'}
Basically, if you want to do mainframe stuff, you should find someone to hire you who needs some work done and doesn't mind paying you to learn, and then *don't assume you know what you're doing*. Even the way terminals and serial ports work is different. Many of the basic assumptions about how operating environments work are different on mainframes. CPU time is not free - if you accidentally run a spin loop, it can cost thousands of dollars very quickly.
It's a very weird environment...
It wouldn't surprise me if there were a 370 emulator out there, but where are you going to get the software to run on it?
AS/400's come up on ebay all the time. Maybe a little small for your definition of a mainframe, but they will fit in your apartment.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
IBM has pretty decent documentation on their stuff, at least the AS/400 docs were good.
Go here for the zSeries and S390 docs.
"From my cold, dead hands you damn, dirty apes!" - CH
I'vebrought up Hercules at home and it does a good job at the HARDWARE level. the real issue is that of getting an O/S that you CAN run.
Older versions of MVS (ie MVT) are available, as are older versions of VM. However, these run in 370 mode, not in ESA or Z mode.
I'm not sure about what Linux versions would run on this emulator.
It is though still a good means of gaining some familiarity with the environment.
There's a free mainframe emulator, but the available operating systems for it are either Linux-based or obsolete IBM operating systems. IBM still charges very high prices for their current mainframe operating systems.
It's a pure interpreter written in C, and thus slow; emulation costs you about two orders of magnitude in performance. But that gives you the performance of an entry-level IBM mainframe circa 1998 or so.
There's a commercial emulator called FLEX-ES, but if you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it. It's being sold to companies who are replacing old IBM mainframes with an emulator running on an x86 rackmount server. IBM will license their OSs for FLEX-ES, as long as the emulated CPU doesn't exceed 8 MIPS (!).
In my city, and I expect in others, the local two year community college teaches extension courses in what we used to call "Data Processing". Basic Tape Monkey and Console operator courses in mainframes and AS400s. JCL, CL, maybe a bit of Cobol, RPG, or some SQL queries. Nothing fancy, but the courses are hands on. These classes would not necessarily be for college credit - perhaps for adult education CEUs. Fees don't seem particularly expensive.
This is obviously dependent on your local CC's resources, interests, and local demand. But check it out.