Grex Systems Conference

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Grex Systems Item 39: The Mainframe item
Entered by cross on Sun Sep 17 00:20:52 UTC 2006:

Mainframes have been around almost as long as computing.  IBM, Tandem, Amdahl,
DEC; ask all your mainframe questions here.  Want to know about IBM's TSO on
top of zOS (formerly MVS) or how to run zOS, MVS, and CMS on a single IBM
mainframe at the same time?  Read on.

9 responses total.

#1 of 9 by maus on Tue Jun 19 00:56:46 2007:

Ok, so for work I am learning the beginnings of MVS. Not as a programmer
or operator, just as a user, but still, I can't believe how fucking
baroque and misfeatured that mess is. Is it too much to ask to have a
VFS of some sort? Why should I have to ask for specific tracks and
cylinders for my record-set? ISPF is friendly, but so slow and
option-limiting. BLAH! I cannot wait to be done with this silly
mandatory course so I can get back to UNIX and UNIX clones.

#2 of 9 by maus on Tue Jun 19 00:57:23 2007:

That said, VM is spiffy.

#3 of 9 by nharmon on Tue Jun 19 01:23:40 2007:

We run Unisys iron at my work, and as a result our environment is MCP. I
have not dealt with it very much but from what I have I can say it is a
real hunk of junk.

By the way, today's mainframes seem to just be a rack of one or three
servers, a disk array (maybe a SAN), some other equipment like a network
switch to connect it all. I remember commenting on how our vmware rack
was set up a lot like a mainframe.

#4 of 9 by twenex on Mon Jul 9 14:22:18 2007:

I would like to be able to run VM on Hercules, an IBM mainframe simulator,
but no joy yet.

I h8 batch OSes though.

#5 of 9 by cross on Mon Jul 9 16:03:24 2007:

VM isn't a batch OS; it's more like a hypervisor.  I've run VM/370 under
Hercules before, but it was a long while ago.  The typical OS that runs under
VM is CMS, the Converational Monitoring System (or something to that effect).
I used that a *really* long time ago on actual IBM mainframes, and it's not
a batch mode system, it's a timesharing system.  Actually, CMS is a
single-user system that runs in a dedicated virtual machine.

#6 of 9 by twenex on Thu Jul 12 20:13:36 2007:

I know what VM is, I was referring to MVS.

#7 of 9 by gull on Wed Aug 22 16:34:54 2007:

Unisys, I'm convinced, only still exists due to vendor lock-in.

#8 of 9 by nharmon on Fri Aug 24 14:30:35 2007:

Unisys still makes the best check image sorters, but otherwise I would
agree with David.

#9 of 9 by luser on Sun Jun 3 02:46:10 2018:

I saw a classic mainfame clone's console at our university yard when I was
a 3rd or 4th former at elemantary school.
At the time of the item I've glanced at the nice EBDIC-art of company's IBM
login screen through 3270 emulator and a trivial login prompt via ssh.

Since then I've never communicated closer to a real mainframe than my credit
card.

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