Absolutely silly geekery

[altivo]

I'm all snickers. Needing some relief from an overload of work that has fallen from the sky into my lap lately, I decided this afternoon to download the Hercules IBM mainframe emulator and install it on my home PC.

To make sense of this you have to realize that my data processing career really began in 1980 when I was trained as an assembly language application programmer to work in an IBM S/370 environment on MVS 3.8 and JES2. Those were interesting years for me. I earned more than I had ever thought likely (though today it would seem like a pittance I'm sure) considering my liberal arts background. I learned a lot of stuff, managed not to learn a lot of other stuff, and eight years later had traveled the path from applications to support to database administration and ultimately to system programming and data administration. Our computer center occupied more than two full floors of a high rise building, and in that time period moved from a 370 model 165 to dual 3033's to 3084 and finally 3090 mainframes. We ran MVS with Intercomm, CICS, and IDMS as well as all the common applications and utilities of the time. I passed my CDP exam, and when one branch of the company moved into VAX architecture, became system manager for multiple VAXen as well.

That seems like forever ago. But it was fun, except for getting beeped in the middle of an icy night to try to recover data from a crashed mass storage cartridge or some such thing. Times have changed.

Now my $500 desktop PC from Dell has more memory, disk storage, and processing power than that datacenter of a quarter century ago. I haven't really thought about MVS or CICS since about 1991, but a year or so ago I ran across mention of the Hercules emulation and had a brief conversation with Jay Maynard, its current guardian and maintainer. It's freely distributed, can emulate not only 360/370 architectures but also the 390 and Z systems, and apparently runs most IBM mainframe operating systems and applications if you can get copies of them.

A couple of the widely used systems are readily available, particularly the OS/360 versions and DOS/VS, because IBM has released them into the public domain (intentionally or not, they acknowledge that situation.) The status of MVS is less clear, but I understand it can be obtained from some sources. (IBM didn't license or charge for OS/VS2-MVS but gave it away with the hardware essentially. Court decisions forced IBM to "unbind" the operating system from the hardware, and other mainframe manufacturers, notably Amdahl, made use of it.)

Anyway, I downloaded the Hercules source and took it home on a flash drive in my pocket. At home, I loaded it into my Dell and built it according to Jay's instructions. It went without a hitch. I started it up using his default configuration file and the console came up exactly as it should. An x3270 session connected to the system and looked just like a 3278 terminal awaiting a system IPL. Now I just have to get hold of an operating system to run on it. According to the documentation, my 2.4 GHz Pentium system should be able to outperform most of the big iron I worked on 25 years ago, and probably keep handling my internet activities simultaneously. I'm not sure whether that's amazing, shocking, or just hilarious.

I wonder where I can find a SAS installation tape...

Comments

[kamo2paws.livejournal.com]

WOW, I have no idea what you are talking about. I remember from when I was really small we had the old IBM square things in a corner of the class being replaced with non green screen computers. I used to play with the old IBMs but I don't recall any of their functionality. I am trying to forget anything Windows ME and earlier as it is..

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Those "square IBM things" were PCs. Toward the end of my mainframe work, we used them as terminals attached to the actual computer, which was as big as a house when you included all the disk drives and tape drives and things.

You young folks have no idea what a difference it is now from just that short time ago. I had almost forgotten myself.

[kamo2paws.livejournal.com]

"Back in my day" windoes 98 was the craze :P

[jmaynard.livejournal.com]

You can get a copy of the Turnkey MVS system from my ibiblio archive site. It's getting a little long in the tooth, and you'll especially want to upgrade RPF from the 1.2 version that's on there to the current 1.5.3 version.

I don't have any help on SAS, unfortunately; I doubt SAS Institute ever released a redistributable version (and kinda doubt they even have a version any more that'll run on MVS 3.8).

I expect you'll get 15-20 MIPS out of your Pentium. Yeah, I keep amazing myself with the level of performance it's good for; my dual dual-core Opteron 275 box will turn 355 MIPS in a tight loop, and about 60 MIPS with real workloads.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the pointer to MVS. I had tried to download from the sites referenced in the FAQ, but those links have changed or gone away. I thought perhaps IBM was challenging them. I did e-mail cbttape.org about the CDs since downloading large files is a problem with only dialup access where I live.

My remark about SAS was mostly facetious. I'm sure SAS Institute has an archive of past versions somewhere, but I'm also confident they don't distribute any of them in any form. Since the product was locked both to the CPU serial number and the date, and automatically expired when the license ran out, it would be more bother than it was worth. It would give your virtual DASD quite a work-out, though.

IDMS-DC would be a more interesting toy, in my opinion, but probably even harder to find. At least when I managed it, that one didn't expire or check serial numbers. They counted on your need for new features and capabilities to get you to renew your contracts.

[jmaynard.livejournal.com]

I never worked at a shop that used IDMS-DC...I only worked at one shop that did IDMS, period, and they used CICS.

No, unfortunately, there's no publicly available version of CICS. It was one of IBM's first three program products. IMS was one of the other two; I don't remember what the third was.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

IDMS-DC was a pleasure, in my opinion, though we used it very little. Compared to CICS, it was a teddy bear with a big grin and a will to please. Not only that, but it could perform. As I recall a couple of the really large airline reservation systems in the 1980s ran on it. Unfortunately, it tended to suffer from the "not an IBM product" syndrome that plagued so many things back then. It probably cost more than CICS, too.

We also had Intercomm when I started, though it was retired about the middle of my lifetime there. That was a holdover from MFT and perhaps even DOS before it. They had a lot of applications on it and it took years to get them all off. Even though the underlying databases were IDMS, they chose to go to CICS because two other large departments of the company were already using CICS. The idea was that not only would it reduce costs for all to use the same platform, but that programmer expertise would crossover between departments. I'm sure it saved some costs, but the notion of programmer crossover failed. No one thought about the fact that the IDMS programs were all written in Cobol while the two CICS-using departments used BAL exclusively. Duh.

We used IDMS-DC anyway because Cullinet started relying on it as the interface to their own configuration and analysis utilities. Mostly we just ran it to get access to those tools, but I did write a couple of small applications for it, and they proved remarkably easy to code and debug compared to CICS.

[hellmutt.livejournal.com]

Heh, wow, I had no idea you were a mainframe programmer. My father still is!

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Well, my age is no secret here. But "were" is the operative term in your comment. I haven't done any real mainframe work since spring of 1994. In a way, I'm quite amazed that they are still being used, though I understand the inertia created by massive amounts of "legacy programs" that can pin banks and insurance companies down to older systems.

What I think I'd really like would be a VAX emulator and the VMS operating system. I haven't gone looking for it though.

[jmaynard.livejournal.com]

SIMH is an emulator system that has many different target machines, including the VAX. You can also get licenses, and a CD-ROM with the OS, from the OpenVMS Hobbyist site. OpenVMS VAX is reported to run well on SIMH.

You can also find a desktop VAX for not a lot of money on eBay.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Noted, thanks. I'll have a look for that after I get over my hankering to see a TSO prompt again. As I said, this is all utterly silly, but also quite amazing to me.

I brought Hercules up again this morning and looked at the web browser interface. The front panel (I assume that's a 360?) is quite a clever touch.

[jmaynard.livejournal.com]

That's patterned after Fish's Windows control panel, a separate GUI that interfaces with Hercules. That, in turn, had most of the graphical stuff patterned afte a 370/168.

[hellmutt.livejournal.com]

In a way, I'm quite amazed that they are still being used,

*nods* It's quite worrying how many banks and similar organisations still seem to be using them, considering the age of most assembler hackers. And, well, my father's company* shows that new stuff's still being written for them.

I did have Hercules installed somewhere, too; never played much with it.

(*Please don't laugh too hard at the website. It was a summer job, I was still in school and they won't pay me to redesign it now I know what I'm doing! :)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

It's hundreds of thousands of lines of legacy code, plus a certain degree of security that many feel is difficult to achieve with distributed processing and computers that just about anyone can touch or load a disk into.

[jmaynard.livejournal.com]

Not hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of billions, according to most estimnates.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Overall, that's probably right. I was thinking of the custom code owned by any one institution, rather than all of them together. ;p

[octatonic.livejournal.com]

*gets that wild eyed look you see from people not ready
to go on stage who are trying /really/ hard and failing,
like juggling flaming chainsaws and they are all in the
air and coming down...*

I had to try and do IBM assembly on a mainframe a very long
time ago.

I failed, it crushed my ego and destoryed my soul and
made me curl up in a ball under my bed until even the
dust bunnies got tired of my company with their small
commune.

Later I discovered the VAX and life went on.

I'm saving this link for when I feel the need for a
real hard beating.

*facepaws*

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I genuinely liked assembly language programming. I was good at it, too. But it's a very painstaking, exacting, and slow art, rather like cataloging library books, which I also enjoy. I don't doubt you could do it, and suspect you weren't given proper training and time to develop the skill.

When I got my first microcomputer (TRS-80 Model 3, no longer with us alas, though I have two still functional Model 4P machines out in the garage) I eschewed Basic and learned Z-80 assembly language too. Gives you a real sense of power, though it takes months to code anything useful.

On the VAX I never learned BLISS or assembler, but went straight for the Pascal and C compilers. Didn't have time to use assembly language by then unless it was absolutely necessary, and with the powerful library routines on VMS, it was never necessary. ;p

[octatonic.livejournal.com]

In this sense I've always failed. I could
never even get 6502 assembly going beyond the
"hello world" bits.

*hangs his head*

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEmCsu4c9dI

Okay, thats over the top, but I /liked/ the
course in highschool about Booleen Logic!

Fortunetly it didn't break me, along with
that long telephone conversation with the
guy that made Elite. "You could always
get into marketing you know..."

c.c

[altivo.livejournal.com]

There is a certain mindset involved. You have to break everything down into nano-micro-babysteps. Not just "rinse the dishes" and not "stack dishes; carry to sink; rinse" but more like:

1. Pick up dish;
2. Carry dish to sink;
3. Turn on water;
4. Rinse dish under running water;
5. If dish is still dirty, go to 4
6. Turn off water;
7. Place dish in rack to dry
8. If there are more dirty dishes, go to 1;
9. Exit code 0.

~.^

[octatonic.livejournal.com]

*turns on the water and stands their,
waiting for the dishes*

*smiles and tailwags, waiting for the dishes*

*the sink overflows and his footpaws get
wet*

MEEF!

*looks down and a guy from the CPU comes
in and puts a hand on his shoulder*

Son, your going to be Dilbert.

@.@

*hits the CPU guy and goes to run but slips
on the floor, now its a small type 2 rapids,
he tries to stand, clutching the sing, trying
to turn off the faucet. He is about to but
the CPU guy grabs his leg, "Your under arrrrr..."
and he's swept away down the heater vent*

@.@

*clings to the sink and hauls himself up to
sit on it. The room is filling with little
ones and zeros. He waves his paws in panic*

MEEP! MEEP!

*On the wall he sees the HALT instruction and
goes for it...too late. He's swept away to
a D in the course and into the great Bit Bucket
In The Sky*

Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!

[altivo.livejournal.com]

You forgot the warning sirens and the big flashing sign that says first "System Abend Imminent!" and then "Operation Terminated. Abend Code S0C1."

[octatonic.livejournal.com]

I don't do EBCIDEC.

XD

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Meaning you do do Windows?

[octatonic.livejournal.com]

On occasion.

^.~

[deffox]

Up until ten days ago I used CICS on a 390. Well, emulated anyway.

I wasn't familiar with what the back end was, but they replaced the terminals with PCs only a few years ago. Some of the PCs are as slow as a 25 MHz 486s.

Talk about making a job take forever. Trying to cross reference designs to inventory, or writing reports that fit on one small form. Teaching a trainee to use it effectively is hard.

Granted it's much better than a paper system. But it's long in the tooth to keep in service.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

The slowness and poor design of the applications are of course independent of CICS itself. It can be done well. Airline reservation systems and other such huge complex tasks ran on it for many years. All that requires real analysis and skilled programming, of course. CICS and the underlying OS are merely vehicles, and the application programs are the drivers, or something like that.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

*looks at your computer wonders why you did all this, shrugs it off as equine geekiness and curls up on the warm computer and sleeps*

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Nostalgia. Maybe cats don't have that. ;p

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Oh yes we do :) Since we like our routines ;)