
The Hercules System/370, ESA/390, and z/Architecture Emulator - luu
http://www.hercules-390.org/
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bri3d
Previously on HN:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6094482](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6094482)

Taking one of the MVS 3.8j "turnkey" distributions for a spin is a fun path
down nostalgia lane, and if you can figure out how to license/acquire z/OS,
z/Linux and z/VM, you can set up a pretty fun virtualized mainframe
environment.

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CountHackulus
IBM also has it's own version of this emulator, though obviously not free. I
used to work on it, it was great fun.

[http://www-304.ibm.com/partnerworld/wps/servlet/ContentHandl...](http://www-304.ibm.com/partnerworld/wps/servlet/ContentHandler/pw_com_zpdt)

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josho
Wow. There is a fortune to be made for a company to support a commercial fork
of this project, as there are a tonne of corporations locked into IBM
mainframes. If this z/Os emulator does it right it might just be a pathway for
those corporations to move to modern systems.

~~~
bri3d
A company called PSI had this idea in the early 2000s, and built a binary
translation layer much faster than Hercules which ran z/OS on Itanium.

They rapidly got sued by IBM, tried to counter-sue on antitrust / unfair
competition grounds, and (amusingly, when you consider the suit) ended up
selling to IBM instead.

In addition to patents and the standard "thou shalt not reverse engineer"
licensing clause, IBM also contractually bind their customers to run z/OS on
only their hardware, although they also maintain a first-party emulator for
development and test situations which don't demand a real zSeries.

I don't think Hercules would do fantastically as a commercial fork anyway -
it's a great tool for play and development, but using it also basically
eliminates any of the reasons to buy a mainframe in the first place - you
certainly don't get lock-step / verified execution, lots of IO channels, or
hot-swappable core hardware by using an emulator.

~~~
kjs3
IBM apparently turned it's jaundiced legal eye towards Hercules at one point.
Apparently, they decided it wasn't worth crushing them. I like to think they
saw the value of something like Hercules out in the wild, but I imagine
there's something less idealistic involved.

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sethish
Maintained by Tron guy! <3<3<3

