There's also the "Michigan Terminal System" (MTS) which was developed by a consortium of Universities. It multuser timesharing system which was *mostly* open-source and developed and in production into the mid-1990's. It could support a few hundred users at the same time, given a big enough mainframe. I know some of my friends are still running it on top of Hercules. Thanks for the talk. I hope to come back to check out Hercules sometime soon!

Fujitsu still sells mainframes, but have announced end-dates for sales and support

Thanks SO MUCH for reminding me just how far we've come with computers & user-friendliness! How I functioned back then, I can't believe.

Hi Jeroen, great speech! Great to see that hercules-390 is still in use!

MVS380, VSE380, and VM380 is available, partitions V=R memory between the 16M and 2G line. TCP/IP is scheduled to be included in TK5 Update2 by Jan 2024. Intercomm (cics clone) is now included.

DASD = Direct Access Storage Device, not "attached".

Very cool talk.

Great talk - thankyou. Mainframes are alive and well. Banking, automotive design & manufacturing, any large business with large databases - they all have mainframes. And the pay is much higher than for PC programmers because of scarcity.

Can I suggest simh as an excellent mainframe emulator? I have a DEC-10 and a PDP-8 permanently running as background jobs. I telnet in from time to time.

I ran some Fortran programs on an IBM 360 and 370 back in the day. I also did a little bit of programming in assembler for the machines. I still have the book on IBM 360 Assembler language. It could be fun seeing if Hercules could be used to run some old programs.

Guess need to breakout my old CICS Copy Books

The mainframe is great for many reasons, but why do its cheerleaders always need to do phallus sizing comparisons, especially when there's a lot of fancy hardware beyond IBM's moat. A Z16 Telum four drawer systems is (physically) 32 compute processors, with 256 cores and 512 threads with a max of 40TB of RAM. Which is fine, especially since their IPC throughput is impressive and raw clocks are high, but if brute compute bragging rights is what you're about, then commodity x86 (in specialized form) can easily beat mainframe hardware. You can get a shared-memory modular NUMA chassis Bullsequana-SH320 that will scale up to 32 sockets (2 sockets by 16 modules connected via 2x UPI at 11.2 GTs, or 166 GBs) at 60 Sapphire Rapids cores per socket for a total 1920 cache coherent Golden Cove cores and 3840 threads (logical processors) with 128TB of RAM (all accessible from a single OS instance), which dwarfs the Z16. And again, this is in a single shared memory system that can also support 32 GPUs. Love or hate Intel, but Golden Cove cores are exceedingly powerful, comparable with Telum IPC at 6 decode, 10 issue, versus Golden Cove at 6 decode, 12 issue. A 32 socket, 1920 core Sapphire Rapids system is one hell of a monster. However, Telum has an obvious advantage in clock speed and a highly sophisticated inter-processor shared caching architecture. Telum also features interesting shared on-die inference accelerators that are especially well suited for certain types of overlay transaction analysis, actions that would be much harder to implement (from a code perspective) on Golden Cove cores, using per-core SIMD. But the REAL reason you buy a mainframe is for unmatched hardware and software integrated fault tolerance, resilience, IO interconnect and partitioning capabilities. While the commodity world has virtualization and containerization, it doesn't have anything nearly as sophisticated or configurable as LPAR's. With firmware support, the ability to carve out and configure resources for LPAR use (with firmware level dispatching and specialized support processors) is unmatched. Furthermore, this is all backed by in-frame processor level fault recovery with processor spares, ICF's for sysplex fault tolerance, etc., which simply doesn't exist outside the mainframe world. And it's all tightly coupled in a very expensive, vertically integrated stack of hardware and software. You pay for a mainframe because, as the old saying goes, nobody ever got shot for buying IBM. The mainframe world doesn't talk about four versus five nines, they talk in terms of cash reimbursements from IBM if ADP's payroll operations are impacted by a failure. So no, I don't think anyone should be talking about the mainframe because it's the biggest or baddest of computers (the most powerful shared memory computers are not mainframes). The mainframe is impressive because it's designed to run 24/7 and never, ever, fail in its intended purpose.

Does it have an option for CICS and vsam db2

Great presentation

"You stick that into a token ring hub, which you have laying around, as one does." LMAO.

holy shit, I've not seen those screens since 1996 haha

Where is the disco-ball??? That was my first thought 😊

Actual TSO and CICS are different frontends running on top of OS/390.

Is there a version of Cobol-85 available?

z/OS i think was 60gb of DASD images and somewhat old. You arent supposed to have it without the mainframe tho. :P

5:31

The tragedy of LSD overdose.

WHERE IS THE FUN AND PROFIT??????? VERY TIME CONSUMING AND DIFFICULT TO LEARN. I WAS A COLLEGE TEACHER AND IT TOOK YEARS TO PRODUCE' GOOD IBM PROGRAMMERS MIN 2YEARS AT COMMUNITY COLLEGE. AT 4 YEAR COLLEGES THEY WOULD STRETCH IT OUT TO 4 YEARS!!!! IT WAS NOT VERY MUCH FUN FOR STUDENTS???

Extremely odd.

“The Dutch speak very well English”. Ffs…

Nothing more telling than showing up in ugly shorts for "your 15 min of fame"!