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Mainframes are expensive and busy running production workloads. Offloading development and test to franken-PC's running 370 emulation had large cost saving pote
by r2sk5t 5y ago
Mainframes are expensive and busy running production workloads. Offloading development and test to franken-PC's running 370 emulation had large cost saving potential. Plus, back in those days the IBM sales organization had a ton of power and could sell anything, the margins were always fantastic, and large numbers of sales reps earned more than the IBM CEO.
- klelatti 5y agoThanks! This makes a lot of sense. I worked for an IBM marketing unit in the 1980s so saw some of this up close!
- rbanffy 5y agoWhy suffer with MS-DOS when you could run VM/370 on your PC? IBM still sells emulators, now software-based, for companies that do mainframe software development. And they are freakishly expensive.
- Koshkin 5y agoFor the rest of us, there is Hercules! http://www.hercules-390.org/ http://www.hercules-390.org/
- rbanffy 5y agoTrue, but there's no legal way to run z/OS on it.
- klelatti 5y agoI used to be involved in Mini sales (System 36). Selling DOS based PCs was a doddle compared to these singularly sluggish and ridiculously heavy machines.
- anyfoo 5y agoI'm not sure VM/370 is less suffering. For example, I run MVS in the typical old 3.8j version (the last public domain one, from I think 1981) as an enthusiast, and it's just amazing how little abstraction there was. MS-DOS practically cuddles you, having an actual file system!
- PhantomGremlin 5y agoit's just amazing how little abstraction there was That was deliberate and made a lot of sense. The functionality was split between two programs. The VM/370 part emulates the raw machine. CMS is the "operating system" on top of the VM "hardware". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversational_Monitor_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversational_Monitor_System