This was a trip down memory lane! I spent many hours working in this environment writing reports to run against our financial system. Good times!

I did this stuff for many years. Brings back memories. Thanks! IEFBR14 forever!

I'm smiling because I used to run SAS programs and even compose JCL to do plant breeding statistical analysis on an AMDAHL mainframe in the first half of the 1980s. It seems perfectly logical that a modern laptop can do the emulation ... given that the 360 might have somewhat less than 4 MB main memory. Those were the days! :^)

Semi-retired mainframe developer here. Great job with the video! I am looking forward to taking TK5 for a spin.

As a microcomputer user and fan of modern computer technology, I love these technological stories about computers. I want to see more of these stores. I would not want to exchange this for anything else.

In the mid-90s IBM gave laptops to their mainframe techs. These highly trained guys could make a mainframe sing and dance. A DOS Windows 3.1 laptop was a different animal. I was part of their internal tech support team. I can't tell you how many calls I received from mainframers who opened a DOS terminal on their laptop and typed 'FDISK' to see what was in their directory. It did not end well. :0)

Tom Brennan has Vista 3270 terminal downloads available all the way back to Windows 3.1. I tested it out a few years ago. Still works.

Now all we need is a CICS simulator and a Cobol compiler and you can feel like you are working in a bank or insurance company in the 1980's!

This was very enjoyable to watch. Thank you! I was a so-so mainframe (OS/VS COBOL) programmer in 1984 on both an MVS system, and a Wang VS system connected to it. I learned a bit about mainframes, COBOL, PL/I, assembler F, etc. in school (using Wilbur -- a wonderful system), graduating in 1984, about three months before my first job, above. I worked then with a 4th Generation system called UFO (User Files Online), which ran under CICS. I even did mainframe operations for a few weeks, using JCL and HASP. I didn't remain a programmer very long, transitioning into Wang VS security and support and then, eventually, networking. Networking led to LAN Manager, then Windows and Windows NT, and on and on. Now, almost 40 years after graduating, I specialize in VMware virtualization. It seems, from watching your presentation, that not all has been forgotten after nearly four decades. Again, thank you very much! I enjoyed the refresher.

“TSO” triggered a bunch of memories from my early days at IBM in the early 80’s. Eg. Every day you’d pass by the RJE window on your way to the cafeteria where you’d submit your card deck jobs and pick up you’re output (eg after lunch). One day we’re walking by the window on way to lunch and there all sorts of commotion going on behind the window. Apparently someone’s job had an infinite looped CR and the line printer was emptying it’s entire spool of paper all over the floor. These paper spools were yards in diameter high and this one was just spinning. 😅Good times.

30 Years as a MF programmer, this brought back many 1000h memories, thanks

15 years ago i was sysad and analyst on MVS machine so much joy for this video ... MVS was still used back in the days (and still today) for the military complex and worldwide banks ... Managing the TAP(e), scheduling jobs, ending it when it crashes, freeing memory, making backups ... I was a noob, when i recall real dev on MVS who were the real kings because they wrote the programs i used in COBOL or ASM They tought & taught me everything it was thrilling ... Godspeed mate for the events in your country.

Thanks Moshix! I have been retired several years and in recent years my role at work involved less and less mainframe time. To relive many happy hours spent in TSO, in the lead-up to retirement, I used to think I ought to look up emulation with all the time on my hands. Now I know where to go for resources to do that. Didn't even know there was an open source MVS version extant. More immediately - you have a great delivery style that is actually on the ASMR because I have fallen asleep every time I try to watch this. We have moved our household in the past week so I guess maybe I am just extra tired. ;-)

For me, it's been 35 years since I was introduced to this, worked with it for over 15 years before I switched to another company with something completely different. Had a great time with regard to developments.

I appreciate that you went over the status bar, I seldom pay attention to that. Excellent job!

There was an MVS system running at NASA until about 2002. It had the Space Shuttle Launch Commit Criteria and maintenance software on it. There were only a few people around that could use it since everyone was brought up on PC's. I had a CP/CMS background (which they also had, running the OMRS and its associated maintenance software, and few could use that one either) so getting into MVS was pretty easy. I wish you could do this whole MVS emulator thing for CP/CMS. The CMS system ran until around 2004 or 5.

I miss the days when I wrote a Minesweeper game in PL/1 on ISPF back in 1992. It had a fixed number of rows and player configurable columns. I had to borrow code for a pseudo random generator since PL/1 did not have one built in. My colleague wrote a Roulette game (I think in CLIST). It looked awesome on our color terminal. He managed to get the table to spin by hacking the TSO "user time slice" which you normally only get on each ENTER keypress. It caused the CPU to run 100% 😅

Fantastic channel! I’m eager to see if you will delight us with some mainframe goodies during this Xmas break.

so far the better explanation to a beginner

Great to see this update! Warm regards, Jeroen

MVS programmer and admins are so rare nowadays, thanks you for this video ! i'm working on my full time job with a mainframe but i didn't know i could train on a VM.

This is an excellent reintroduction to TK5 and the MVS 3.8! I have dabbled and stranded with TK4- several times in the past, but as the saying goes; 13th time's a charm. Having worked with many sorts of computers since the early 80s - ranging from, roughly, VMS/UNIX and various 6502 based computers and into the contemporary, it is confounding how very differently I need to think when learning the MVS.

Very cool. Seriously watched it all. Love being able to run a 'mainframe' locally.

Programmed COBOL and MVS Assembler on an IBM 3090 mainframe, this brings me back.

Thanks for the interesting historic mainframe info. For people that never have had access, its very informative.

Thanks for your great videos! I just found your channel by fluke a few days ago. It's really nice to see there are still highly knowledgeable people like you (and many commenters) who know of and worked on these systems. These old technologies are becoming so old now that it's not easy to come across folks who really know them and the history. Keep up the great work.

Great update to your previous video. Was not aware of TK5. Wonderful to see the community has updated TK4. I've been using MVS Community Edition Sysgen and I'm still in awe of it. To have a freshly sysgened system with a single Python script is a marvel.

Well done! The what, the how and the why of things are explained in ways I was able to understand them. That means something :-)

While in the operating systems course, we were running VM/370 and using it to boot our OS as a guest. Somewhere along the line we managed to trip a bug that resulted in the microcode on the real hardware faulting (4381 with math extensions). We had a team from IBM in and they wanted to see all our code and the boot code written by the professor. It turns out that they had an issue in that the microcode had been customized and the recovery disks could not be read. The mainframe was doing double duty as a production machine at night doing payroll with a virtual MVS machine running as a VM client and some other student records stuff. Our guest OS had grounded that production VM to a halt! IBM was very secretive about what had happened and how it was fixed. We only found out about the issue a few months later when our professor let it slip the extent of the issue.

Thanks so much for this. I have a lot of friends that will enjoy utilizing this. I just MVS was portable for the Intelx86 and modern platforms. I love the OS prioritization that is available and the non-swappable option for certain tasks that just aren't readily available on the OS's that I'm used to.

:) Around 1987, I wrote a process monitoring program for a factory in Turbo Pascal, running on el-cheapo a IBM PC clone. The client complained that the output was slow (which it was), so I simply wrote routines to write directly to the display buffer (something everybody did back then). It worked for a while, until the client found it slow again. Then it dawned on me that I didn't have to write to the display buffer directly, but to an array of words just as big as the screen buffer itself, then when I was done, I simply did “screenBuf := virtualBuf;”, and almost instantly the screen was updated with the new information, just like a 3270 terminal would do. The client was delighted… (I even added a “busy” indicator box on the status line at the bottom that I turned on whenever I was doing some processing)…

Thanks! Great introduction to MVS-TK5. I was a system programmier in the mid-70s and this gave back many memories. I was able to run It on Windows 11 but on macOS it failed because of the SIP (System Integrity Protection).

Thank you very much for the video! With the help of an web browser extension i downloaded the video and i am building a special mini pc for the purpose of learning mainframe environment. I would like to learn COBOL too. Thanks again!

Purple Motion in the intro... you got me watching just to see what other gems you've included.

A most enjoyable refresher. With the addition of Wally Mclaughlin's ISPF clone, you no longer need to make the JOB NAME match the userid in order to view the output in ISPF 3.8. You can also add the NOTIFY=&SYSUID parameter to the JOB statement so that whatever userid used to log in is notified of JOB completion. Many thanks for these helpful and enjoyable videos!

Wow, talk about a blast from the past. I was an old legacy guy; s360 all the way to Z-Series. Specialized in Assembler; O/S all the way from MVS-SP thru z/OS. Lots of internals work; system dump analysis, IOCDS/IOCD, etc. Thanks for this. Made me laugh though; I used to get annoyed when folks would refer to ISPF as TSO.....to me, TSO native was TSO, ISPF (ISPF/PDF) was the full screen facility where EDIT was TSO's line editor. See, I'm just an old hack :)

LETS GOOOOO🤘

Pretty cool. I was admin on an AS400 for a while so this is neat to play with on my own system

very interesting, thanks a lot !

WOW - Best intro to the MF ever!

i was working on JCL ... what a journey !!! cobol ... ipl etc ...😢

Might be good to show video or pictures of a real card deck being taken to a counter, printouts being collected later and point out that this is the same but friendlier to trees.

Ooo, so much nostalgia straight off the bat from hearing the term DASD. Been so long since I heard proper IBM speak. What's next? Hard file? Planar? Acetates?

Ohhh!!! And there is a PL1 compiler too! DEC FIXED (15,0)

Great!✨✨✨✨ Thank you! 👏👏👏🇵🇾🇵🇾🇵🇾🇵🇾

IBM charged huge prices for the licenses per year back then......you rented the hardware back then with cost of how much CPU power was used !!.....it used so much electricity that we had to have like 8 diesel generator on standby at power failure. This was at SAS Data (SAS Airline) in the 80-90's and 00's

Would've sworn that DASD was Direct Access Storage Device.

This brings back memories of when I worked on the MVS/ESA mainframe from the late 80s to early 90s. Ran the job console, mounted tapes, ran printers. TSO/ISPF was the charm of an editor, preferred it over using ROSCOE. Are there any CICS binaries included with the distro? I'd love to get back to doing some fun programming since I stopped using COBOL in the 90s.

Yeah TK5!

I didn't know TK5 was out, cool. Also yes I would suggest x3270 if you are running linux

To me RPF is the "Roscoe Programming Facillity" Roscoe was an other (non IBM) Productivity (Time Sharing) system. But unlike TSO (TSO had a address-space for every user) Roscoe had only one Address-space you shared with every Roscoe User. TSO was doing TimeSharing on OS level, ROSCOE was doing TimeSharing within Roscoe itself. And RPF was the Scripting language in Roscoe to create your own productivitye script, even to automate OS management tasks. TSO Uses CLIST an REXX as scripting languages. But i might completely wrong what RPF means in this system.

Love this. I started as a MF programmer in 1980 you are doing a terrific job sharing these OS with the next generation. A couple of comments it would really help if you had transcript and maybe you could add notes on running the two batch files. Is anyone using MVS 3.8 on a laptop for any practical purposes?

I always used to conceptualise ISPF as sitting "on top" of TSO in a similar way that Windows 3 sits "on top" of DOS. Thusly if one quit out the top level of the ISPF menu hierarchy, the ISPF session shut down and you essentially got dumped back to the command line (TSO) and had to start up ISPF again if you wanted to get back in to the ISPF environment. (Humour me - it's been 30 years or so!) It may be useful for your viewers to explain why the right control key was remapped to "enter" in the 3270 emu. Put simply, it's because that's how the keyboard was laid out on a real 3270 terminal. As described in the video, on the real 3270 K/B, what is the enter key on a modern PC K/B just generated a newline to the terminal controller and only when you hit "enter" (the remapped right ctrl) did it poke the actual mainframe into life at which point it would wake up, look at what you had typed and decide what to do about it. (Which could take a while if you were on the far end of a very slow serial line!)

Thanks for another great video sir. C programming often requires editing and linking multiple files. Would it be possible to demonstrate a workflow using the editor doing this? Also, can the editor do things like splitting the view port to aid cross-referencing for example? Any references/videos on the editor environment would be most appreciated. Thanks again!

I noticed that intercomm disk is available with the tk5. Will we see a video on getting it loaded and running soon? Maybe another Kicks being loaded again with this update. I don't know how Intercomm looks but I like Kicks, it reminds me of the old CICS. Thanks for the videos.

running on windows is so easy by this guide with some minor twist that the osx is really bad. I still remember I can run it something like TK4_ but here both M1 and Intel Mac does not work. M1 argued that there is no readelf (and use binutils then use greadelf still does not do it). Intel is still issue as both console mode and deamon mode complaint about missing ( and I guess something is wrong. Anyway stick with windows oddly then.

When I was a trainee operator on a 360/65, MVS stood for "Multiprogramming with Virtual Storage". I could still probably write decent JCL including the mysterious utility IEFBR1415 which did nothing.

I went to TK5 from TK4+, fresh install, having fun with it. Can you do a vid of ART1 that's in your GITHUB, interesting stuff?

I still have my IBM 370 Yellow Card in my desk. Next to my unused punch cards

Remember, the correct way to press the Enter key is with your curled up pinky finger and a flick of the wrist 😊

Thanks for a great video. Quick question: where do WTO messages appear?

Makes me miss the old 360/30 and card punch.

I am reading now a book "Apollo Guidance Computer", this was perhaps something! the addressing .......... don't forget they used an IBM 360/100 as a ground computer. No integrated circuits.

Did you explain when the keyboard is blocked that you can clear this with the left CTRL key ?

Would this run ROSCOE? I loved fiddling with its batch/programming system between mounting tapes and breaking down 11x14" green-bar reports for the real programmers.

Hello Moshix, as an old IBM Systems programmer I enjoy your videos. How can I mail you? Regards, Marcel Faber

Hey 'moshix', may I ask a question? I've restored an ACT Apricot PC, a Scottish-built British-designed IBM PC near-clone, (using the same "IBM System 34 DD-mode" format for it's drives used by it's precursor, the American Victor Sirius Computer). It is possible to run C, COBOL and FORTRAN as well as CP/M-86 and Concurrent CP/m-86 (if you can find the disks, any where - internet archived collections are somewhat incomplete.) Of course, the standard OS was boring-old MS-DOS (version 2.11) which include two Microsoft line-editors. One is the obvious BASIC, the other is EDLIN, written, like DOS-86 (a.k.a. QDOS) by Tim Paterson in 1980. It seems these early business micro were designed not just to run business software but also to translate programmes from Mainframes to Micros, and back again - but how??? And, how would you use EDLINE (or "ED" in Unix based systems, including MacOSX and macOS) to work in conjunction with a Mainframe or Mini Mainframe? Were / are these programmes useful in any way, or were they a stop-gap measure to ease the transition? Perhaps, in other words, I'd love to know if I can learn anything these great machines using my collection of old Micros - including the BBC model-B from Acorn Computers - another British brand - which can run assorts using a Raspberry Pi to replace a "second processor". I hope that question makes sense! Best wishes.

how to properly shutdown may be good my take in 3270 f3... when prompt ready logoff in console /p tso /z net /$p jes2 /z eod /quiesce

Around 15:30. Regarding the speed of the emulator. Is there any way to throttle Hercules to limit the MIPS in order to get a feel for how long it took to do things (e.g an IPL) on a real mainframe back in the 60's, 70's and 80's?

If there just would be a free TWS, CICS and DB2 available for home use with hercules.

Is there any chance for vm intro like this, perhaps even boot mvs on it. … wonder.

Slightly off topic. There are several choices on the P/390 such as VM/ESA but as a novice which is the best for learning and the most flexible

Please! I have to know what keyboard you're (slapping) using!!

I saw a video about accessing SDSF; but it's not anywhere I can find it. Is (was) that a separate componenet?

I got an IEF452I JOBFAIL JOB NOT RUN - JCL ERROR, and now I can't access PRIMCOB2 because it's in use. Any idea as to why I got that error, and how can I fix it?

Tried to install Tk5 update 2 on Ubuntu. It won't start up. All the log says is Hercules has crashed (Illegal instruction). Have you come across this issue before?

Does this MVS 3.8 TK5 include CICS and IMS perchance?

crikey, even has JES running.....I am stunned.....talk about walking down memory lane....

I always dream to have IBM/370 machine at home...

How can we define timezone and set time ?

AS400 guy but very interesting

Is there something similar to Omegmon by Candle?

I have a problem that my terminal sessions tend to hang after about 10 minutes. If i re-connect i get to the login screen and it says the user is already logged in. Any tips for fixing this?

Why doesn't TK5 include REXX. Is rexx licensed?

Is there not a parm or file to change for cpu=2 ?

direct access not direct attached. attached is a modern thought ie vs nas

does this tk5 version has db2?

If you are recruiting and ask if the candidate likes TSO, if he/she starts talking about Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, then you got the wrong candidate.

Wasn’t it MVS on the system 3090s?

Thsnks a lot for the video... but I have a pleasure to ask I you can help me please. In my office, I must generate a file that have inside a COPM-3 fields in order to export it in some gov. company. In the past I worked with cobol but on the AS400 machine. So I know how to do it if I can use Cobol language. The problem is that in my office PC I can't install software... so what I can is only download zip packet, unzip it and run it. So my question is... what I can download in my office pc in order to have a cobol compiler please ? I so your video about dosbox and SPF-PC... and tomorow I'll try to run it on the PC. But... because I see you're a guru of this thinks... is there something more easy that I can do please ? Thanks in advance for help

does tk5 has ims?

This is a great video but - man - you are as fast as this machine. You have to explain it more slowly. You go here and there to this and that window- back and forth - and all I hear is -punch-punch-punch- What? At 38:42 I lost it and was unable to see my output. Why? Because you type an S so fast without explaining. Man! We are beginners. We break our fingers by trying to figure out which button is what. :-)

Is USS included to the image? Thx.

i runnon ubuntu. what is the best 3270 emulator? i tried both c3270 and x3270. are there any better ones? with x3270, fonts are a mess. with c3270 setting up keymaps is a mess

MVS, no it doesn't. It stands for Multi-user Versatile Solution engine, I know I had the MVS domain for years. After seeing what "Multivalve" Databases could do in relation to speed, flexibility, reliability and security I began MVS to move the solution into mainstream IT. Deployable within it's own environment within Windows we could run it away from the MF on anything, I even had access to a Raspberry Pi distro. Requiring a massive sea change for the user, I came up with the idea of masking the text interface with first a Jason based then HTML 5 UI, making it deployable on any device running a browser. However taking on azure, sap, aws and oracle by having a better solution, was not enough to sell it.

Old very old

To fix the capitalization of the ISPF main panel, edit sys2.isp.plib(isp@prim) and make the change. Simple as could be.