My Vacation So Far: VM/370 on Hercules
Well, so far I’ve bootstrapped an operating system older than I am, on an emulated IBM mainframe:
VM/370 is able to be redistributed freely and legally, and a good amount of documentation for it is online.
I wish IBM would recognize the “hobbyist market” and release limited versions of z/OS for educational use only on emulators. There’s a free version of z/VM, but its hardware requirements (even for an emulator) are almost prohibitive.
February 9th, 2009 at 7:53 pm
Lots of manuals for VM/370 are available at …
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/370/vm370/
February 9th, 2009 at 8:00 pm
Thanks! I’ve known about Bitsavers for a long time, I just never thought to look there for VM/370 manuals.
April 4th, 2009 at 5:28 am
Which VM/370 did you use? I’ve been trying to use the one from Rob Abeles .. The restore of the 3410 tape to the 3330 dasd device is taking forever …. Would you mind sharing your hercules configuration file?
April 18th, 2009 at 4:17 am
You should have a look at z/VM. It’s the latest, and works really well. Installed it on my macbook, works easy and simple.
z/VM 5.3 can be downloaded directly from IBM’s web site. Just register and you’ll get access to it.
Then basically follow the instructions in the enclosed PDF file, and even if they might not make sense at first, they do actually work.