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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

If we are really talking about free and open-source software, the ISA is irrelevant. Over the years, I've used Emacs on Alpha, SPARC, PA-RISC, POWER, MIPS, ARM and x86 under at least six different operating systems and it works flawlessly on all of them. I never had the chance to confirm that, but I suspect it works very well on IBM zSeries mainframes too.

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It was about open-source hardware: monopolies can limit freedom in hardware too. The Pentium FDIV bug was trivial to validate at that time, since it was common even for an undergraduate at a small university to have accounts on Sun SPARCS, HP PA-RISC, and DEC Alpha in addition to POWER Macs and Windows x86. And there were other choices in the ecosystem like SGI MIPS.

Granted, that may seem like ancient history, but RDRAND is an indication that Intel still makes mistakes.

Less fragmentation is more efficient in many ways, but just like any monoculture, it is also fragile.

Serious question: can the zSeries do full-duplex terminal communications or the modern equivalent?

I first started using EMACS shortly after various IBM systems, and it's hard to express how obnoxious it was to have your keyboard lock while the computer was sending you stuff....

The question is serious because it's not clear to me the use cases of the zSeries including supporting this sort of thing (vs. editing your files on another computer like your PC before submitting them to the mainframe ... but I haven't touched anything in that domain since ... 1978 I think).

I don't think a 3270 would be very comfortable for Emacs. I once saw a 3278 hooked to a 390 running Unix (I don't think it was AIX) and seeing text scroll on a 3278 was interestingly alien. Running Emacs would be doable, but most 3270 editors I can remember (low 80's) took advantage of the local terminal smarts and worked on a form/page based concept. Emacs was designed for the VT-100 world where terminals were not particularly smart.

Having said that, you can host Linux VMs under zVM. Binaries will use the zSeries ISA and the whole guest will run under the zVM environment. You can easily ssh to it. IIRC, Debian, Red Hat and SuSe support it.

This would probably be the least cost-effective way to edit text. On the other hand, few terminals were able to render monospaced text so beautifully.

You can just SSH into a modern z. It has a full POSIX environment, so you could run real EMACS.

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/os/zos/features/unix/library...

http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/zos/v1r11/index.jsp?topic=...

But we're not talking about FOSS. We're talking about software in general, and some types of software can't be sustained by any traditional FOSS monetization model. These kinds of software will usually be distributed as binaries, and you'll just have to switch to whatever OS and ISA the developers care to compile for.

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