
The Hercules System/370, ESA/390, and z/Architecture Emulator - emersonrsantos
http://www.hercules-390.eu/
======
tacon
The learning curve for Hercules can be pretty steep, as it drops you in to a
working version of MVS 3.8j. If you are familiar with all that means, you are
golden. The rest of us need some guides. Moshix has a great YouTube channel
with lots of good videos. I started with his "IBM’s MVS 3.8 on Linux for
newcomers - M50"[0], and I had a sample ancient COBOL program, with assembly
language subprograms, running in under an hour. My main issue was the editor
or shell (not sure which) locking up and not able to get out. I can kill the
Linux process, but that leaves all the mounted disks in a slightly corrupted
state, and doing the equivalent of fsck is beyond my skill level. I just
reinstalled the Hercules package again, with a pristine set of disks, but that
isn't going to help if I had a real program I was working on. Maybe there is a
recovery guide for common hangups that I haven't discovered yet.

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6sK_BhVD8g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6sK_BhVD8g)

~~~
nulbyte
> The learning curve for Hercules can be pretty steep, as it drops you in to a
> working version of MVS 3.8j.

Hercules does not come with MVS 3.8j, that just happens to be the version of
MVS that is available publicly. You can also run several other mainframe
operating systems on it.

> My main issue was the editor or shell (not sure which) locking up and not
> able to get out.

More likely, the terminal locked up. If you try to type where there is no
field to type into, you'll lock the keyboard. To reset it, press Escape, then
tab to the field you want to type in.

------
SuperPaintMan
Hercules is really cool! There's even a old version of the zOS ADCD on
pastebin you can download and get IPL'd in Hercules. But if you want to just
muck around with a current zOS environment check out master the mainframe and
grab a learning ID. Then get playing around!

[https://www.ibm.com/it-infrastructure/z/education/master-
the...](https://www.ibm.com/it-infrastructure/z/education/master-the-
mainframe)

~~~
lboc
Has the MTM/learning system been submitted to HN before, do you know? I'm
getting kinda tired of copy-pasting the same links over and over :)

~~~
robin_reala
Once without traction:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22783438](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22783438).
Submit it again.

~~~
lboc
Thank you. I can't believe I only just noticed the 'search' box at the bottom
of the page...

------
pinewurst
FYI Unisys also makes available free emulators of their two mainframe
environments. The ex-Burroughs MCP IMHO is a lot more interesting than the
yucky IBM stuff.

~~~
lokedhs
Do you happen to have a link to it?

I've been playing with MVS 3.8j on Hercules on and off for the last year and
found it rather interesting. I'd love to play around with the Unisys stuff as
well, since I've never used it before.

~~~
lboc
I went looking for it myself a while back:

[https://www.unisys.com/offerings/clearpath-
forward/clearpath...](https://www.unisys.com/offerings/clearpath-
forward/clearpath-forward-products/clearpath-mcp-software/clearpath-mcp-
express)

Unfortunately, I haven't got access to a Windows machine at the moment.

------
mkovach
There is a guy on Youtube, moshix, that does a number of videos on IBM
mainframes and does quite a bit with Hercules and various OS distributions
that run on it. He helped my remember some stuff from my early career. I was
able to get some of my old FORTRAN code running on a MVS 3.8 setup.

I also setup a vm370 system with a few different things running on an older
Raspberry PI. It was fun to think I could run the old application I maintained
on a system that is about the size of the pack of cigarettes my old boss use
to keep on his desk.

------
rbanffy
If you feel like a quick visit to your own mainframe, you can use this:

    
    
        docker run -it -p 3270:3270 rbanffy/vm370

~~~
monocasa
That's cute that it runs on port 3270.

~~~
lboc
I thought everybody did it that way!

~~~
rbanffy
We could standardize on port 3277 for 12-line, 40-column uppercase displays,
3278 for monochrome with a beautiful and warm shade of green and 3279 for
color ;-)

~~~
lboc
Thanks for your 3270 font by the way. It's my daily driver for terminal
sessions.

~~~
rbanffy
Thank you for the encouragement. :-)

------
skissane
I put MVS 3.8J (emulated under Hercules) inside a Docker container –
[https://github.com/skissane/mvs38j](https://github.com/skissane/mvs38j)

The idea of running a 1970s vintage operating system inside a Docker container
amuses me. Old meets new. (For extra "old meets new", I should make it run
under k8s.)

------
lboc
Most active development is happening on the SDL fork I believe:

[https://github.com/SDL-Hercules-390/hyperion](https://github.com/SDL-
Hercules-390/hyperion)

------
ngcc_hk
It is easy to up (I were an Ibm system programmer for dos/vse and doing xa
migrate your esa). But writing a cobol program is hard as far as I find. Hope
it is better these days.

------
non-entity
I have some old mainframe modems and online information on them are scarce
(basically nothing outside of old ads). I'd like to figure out how it worked,
but no idea how to get started. Are the drivers something that the OS would
support built-in, or would you have to install them somehow. Would this
emulator help me at all?

~~~
tyingq
Do you have a model number?

It's most likely a synchronous modem meant for 4 wire leased lines, which
don't really exist anymore.

~~~
non-entity
Yep, the model is 3865-2. Would it be possible to create a "fake" four wire
leased line? I've looked into creating fake dial up lines for DSL modems and
that seems to be possible.

~~~
tyingq
Should be. The 4 wire connection is the round one on the back. You would need
to crossover the tx and rx pairs between the modems.

The other port is standard rs232.

~~~
non-entity
Cool, as far as protocol / communication standards go am I looking at one of
the V. _x_ standards?

------
malkia
I've always associated the "Hercules" name with the mono-monitor from the past
:)

~~~
th0ma5
I had what I think may have been a CGA and EGA emulator, so even though I was
in monochrome, we could still run high resolution graphics with a little
grayscale. Very nice. I wonder if DOSBox can do that...

------
hsnewman
Jay Maynard (tron guy) is a really talented
guy![https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9dutFhebw4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9dutFhebw4)

~~~
dijit
That was very painful to watch. I feel like he never even started.

People have such short attention spans and the judges kept making him start
over repeatedly... and when they started booing I genuinely felt for the guy..
Props to the guy for keeping clear, that would have destroyed my spirit.

------
bitminer
Any chance to get MTS running?

I remember exploring MTS back in the day, UBC was running it on some kind of
machine in the mid-1970s.

~~~
pinewurst
[http://archive.michigan-terminal-
system.org/mts-d60A](http://archive.michigan-terminal-system.org/mts-d60A)

