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There's no legal way for a hobbyist to run anything better than MVS 3.8j on Hercules and even if you're not morally opposed to piracy, z/OS is virtually impossi
by bri3d 8y ago
There's no legal way for a hobbyist to run anything better than MVS 3.8j on Hercules and even if you're not morally opposed to piracy, z/OS is virtually impossible to find and configure.
- rbanffy 8y agoThere is a Hercules-like product made by IBM that can legally run z/OS, the Z Development and Test Environment. It's expensive, but legal. Also, a surprising number of concepts of MVS 3.8j are present in z/OS, so what you learn there is not wasted. As the article points out, a lot still spins around 80-column punched cards. If you go for the less bare distributions of MVS, you'll see lots of software that tries to replicate the functionality of newer releases. As an example, I pinged Cincom Systems to see if they had an old version of Mantis that could run on MVS 3.8 that I could obtain for free (Mantis was the language I used on mainframes). To my surprise, that version is still a commercial product and is fully supported. Things dom change very slowly in mainframe land.
- trasz 8y agoFinding z/OS is easy once you know you need to search for "ADCD".