
A Mythical Phoenix: Mainframe’s Evolution - rbanffy
https://www.share.org/blog/a-mythical-phoenix-mainframe-s-evolution
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jshaqaw
I don’t claim to be an expert here so please correct me but if the mainframe
vendors want to extend the life of this technology then they should invest a
bit more in helping curious explorers access them. Whether through emulation,
documentation which is a bit zippier (i.e., more Whys Guide to Ruby and less
1978 phone book, etc...). The closed nature of information on mainframes means
that it’s hard for people to catch the bug of interest in them by fooling
around first.

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terlisimo
Mainframe emulator:
[http://www.hercules-390.org/](http://www.hercules-390.org/)

Yeah, it's kind of hard to get into the mainframe business. Kind of like
getting into piloting a passenger jet. You can't pilot a passenger jet without
a few hundred hours of flight time on a jet aircraft.

You can't just buy a used one and fly around on your own. So you hope someone
who owns a jet will lug you around until you become competent and certified.

~~~
kev009
I have a z114 and a z800 and a P/390\. Not any harder than for instance owning
professional wood working gear.

~~~
le-mark
And you have media for the OS you can install on them? And setup and
configuration to a useable system is as simple as the guided wizards other OSs
provide?

~~~
kev009
Yup. It's not like installing Ubuntu on a laptop but I don't think that's to
be expected. IBM does have zPDT which is a lot easier.

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ngcc_hk
Whilst it may be true that it can run cobol, one must have to aware the
assembler part of the story. Still remember the enjoyment of from 24 to 31
bit. And apar and s/370 assembler language patch.

It is not all colour.

Btw the claim you cannot run old msdos is over stretching. Still running turbo
pascal on dos.

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nabbed
Waxing nostalgic: I loved working on mainframes back in the day. My job was a
little unusual for a mainframe programmer, so maybe that's why: my team was
customizing the VM/370 hypervisor and its usual guest OS ("CMS") for our
employer's needs. It was mostly 370 assembly, for the OS changes, and the
occasional script (or "Exec", as it was called in CMS). I wasn't doing much
app development and never saw anything that looked even remotely like JCL.

I loved it, and I would never go back to it.

