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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

You can try your hand with one of my Docker images.

docker run -it -p 3270:3270 rbanffy/vm370

Then connect your 3270 client(s) to port 3270 on localhost and play like it’s the 1970’s.

Disclaimer: that image has a 370, the successor of the 360.

For this image, user CMSUSER has password CMSUSER, user MAINT (has more privileges) has password CPCMS. I now forgot the password for OPERATOR. I’ll post it here when I remember what it was. This image is built on the Sixpack distribution of VM/370. Google for it and you’ll find lots of information.

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Get my 3270, show VM/370. As an MVS/DB2 guy, not sure what to do next. Any CMS tutorial for this Hercules based VM/370 I wonder. (The MVS side is easier for me and even can do some old time compliation of ISPF ...)

You can check in the vm370.org website. They publish the VM/370 Community Edition (which is a lot like the one I packed - the CE version is rbanffy/vm370ce on the command line).

I'm still very much a newbie on this.

running last 2 days and get my fortran compiled etc. Just whenever I logoff and quit the emulator, all are lost!!! Just double check, logoff will keep the files. But as there is no way to shutdown the terminal system it seems, I just quit and all are lost.

I did download my files one by one to my pc using Tom.

I will look at the vm 370 but wonder whether it will be too hard, as there is no setup like tk5 and like your docker. Yours seems just one command away (and change the port to non-3270 to avoid conflict with my mvs.) And tk5 just run.

I do not know how even to start the vm 370 community edition after download!

You’d need to restart the container rather than running it again from scratch for the state changes to stick.

I'm thinking about modifying the shadow disk setup (the base disk is immutable and only the shadow file is changed) to make the shadow folder persistent, but that'd be better done at the cluster management level.

MVS TK5 has (a clone of) ISPF built in.

https://www.prince-webdesign.nl/tk5

Whilst still not able to get a permanent copy, but VM/370 got not as good but ok "ee" full screen editor plus an interactive file list manager. I develop program faster than MVS 3.8 actually.

Oh... I have used EDIT. It's actually fun to see the patterns of editors evolving from line-based editors to modal full screen ones, to non-modal full-screen.

VM/370 is something like a hypervisor, CMS is a single user operating system mostly for development tasks. In production other operating systems were used, maybe MVS?

Not sure whether it worked already like this in the 360 area.

CMS was used not so much for development as for setups that really focused on interactive time sharing approaches, vs "extra special batch job" of TSO under MVS

I was a trainee in an IBM lab nearly 40 years ago. All developers including myself worked using VM/CMS. That I remember for sure.

With production workloads I had nothing to do, so I am not sure what was the most commonly used OS. Pretty sure no bank clerk, airline counter or similar ran CMS.

Talking with some elder developers, it always seemed to me that VM/CMS combination was mainly popular at universities and labs, so arguably a related environment.

Probably was helped once people figured how to also run DOS and MVS under VM.

Airline Counters of course ran (and some still do) TPF, and serving massive amounts of users with standardised forms was much easier with CICS (I seem to recall a story about some retail chain actually running their POS on single mainframe in 1970s with each retail clerk using a 3270-compatible terminal to access CICS forms).

Yes, CICS came to my mind. But CICS is not an operating system, it needs one to be run AFAIK. The Wikipedia article says it runs under VM/MVS or VM/VSE.

OS/360 was discontinued. MVS is listed as one of its successors.

So I believe, while interesting, the VM/CMS emulator/simulator mentioned above is only representing System/370 period, not System/360.

I am certainly not an expert on the matter.

Edit: Following a couple of Wikipedia links tells that in the 360 period something called CM/CMS existed. It seems only loosely related to the VM/CMS used in the 370 period.

Edit 2: For an emulator see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_(emulator)

Edit 3: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM_mainframe_ope... seem worth reading. The 360 chapter links nicely to TFA, e.g. The Mythical Man-Month.

VM/CMS from my understanding started in System/360 period, but it was not really something advertised - initial versions ran on specific models only, and even later on it wasn't necessarily available to officially purchase.

I don't think virtual memory existed on the 360. The unofficial OS provided to some important customers dissatisfied with the nightmare delays in OS/360 was CM/CMS. Maybe the CM/CMS command line experience was already rather similar, I don't know.

Virtual memory did not even exist in the first S/370 models, that was a slightly later feature.

Disclaimer: Thinking is different from knowing :)

The origin point was, according to my searches, specially modified S/360-40, where CP-40 (VM's "grandpa") was developed as well as CMS.

This was followed by S/360-67 which introduced address translation to S/360 and was specially built for timesharing - there, CP-67 was developed, and since model 67 was sold normally, it was apparently provided to some customers as alternative OS. CP-67 evolved into VM/370

Yeah, when reading VM I thought too much about virtual memory. But IBM famously never used the term memory, but called it storage. So VM probably only referred to Virtual Machine. So their first virtual machines including all during 360 era, probably still showed physical adresses, even if more than one virtual machine could using the same addresses exist. None of them had page tables, they all had the same addresses. First MVS (multiple virtual storages) changed that.

Mainframes notably call memory “storage”, so virtual memory becomes “virtual storage”. The idea of virtual machines in mainframes is closely tied to user logins as you get “your own” machine on logon. IBM mainframes diverged from the OS tree very early on and evolved similar services, but with very different conceptual frameworks.

I worked for a few banks starting in the 1980’s. It was all MVS. End user applications were created using CICS and IMS. What we used to call OLTP (online transaction processing).

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