Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2000 13:12:27 -0600 (CST)
From: Daniel Seagraves <root@xxxx.xxxxx.xxxx
Subject: 360/370/390 OSes

Okay, more silly questions.

So far, as far as IBM's OSes go, I've only heard of/saw a few.

I'm toying with OS/360 at the moment.

TSS was the Time Sharing System for the 360. Never met it but read about it.

VM/ESA runs on 390s apparently. Saw a login screen and the machine itself
at a college, but nothing past that. Another one used to be at
vm.ecnet.net, but it's apparently gone now.

VM/SP ran on a something I met and saw at a local large company. (Morton
Buildings for the curious.) I dunno if they still have the machine. I
dunno if it was a 370 or a 390. I doubt it was a 360, it was somewhat
small (Only filled the medium-sized room it was in. 360s took floors,
didn't they?) I dunno anything else about it other than I stole the login
screen for one of our UNIXes. (telnet to ubani.umtec.com and look. I
think I got it wrong though, not sure. I only saw the machine twice.)
Anyway, the machine was on raised flooring, took special power, and had
9-track tapes. I didn't see the processor, just the disk drives and tape
drives. They had 4 tape drives and a mess of disks.

I've met and played with the whatever it is that runs on the S/34 and
S/36. (One of my friends has the 34, I own the 36.) Dunno it's name,
it's called SSP everywhere I see it.

I was told to avoid AIX like the plague, so I have. Never saw one past a
login screen.

What else am I missing, and on what did it run?
Oh, and is anything other than OS/360 available without getting a legal
beating from IBM?

"Confuse, annoy, and DEE-STROY!" -- Jet Wolf | "Nothing Happens." -- ADVENT
"...A man can pass his family and his name down through his sons, but it's
his honour that gets passed through his daughters. He can see the best
and worst of life in his girls. A daughter is something far too precious,
and he'll do anything to protect her."
-- Reichsfuehrer Siegfried Koenig, _Matrose_Mond_, David Oliver

Re: 360/370/390 OSes

Jay Maynard

Jan 6, 2000

On Thu, Jan 06, 2000 at 01:12:27PM -0600, Daniel Seagraves wrote:
> I'm toying with OS/360 at the moment.

Me too; I think this will be the focus of a lot of Hercules hacking, simply
due to its availability in machine-readable source form. (Hope Rick Fochtman
comes through with my CD soon...)

> TSS was the Time Sharing System for the 360. Never met it but read about it.

I just got my copy of 360/67 Functional Characteristics in the mail...
interesting reading. The /67 was intended to run TSS; I don't know if it'll
run on any other 360/370 hardware. The /67 implemented a different, and
incompatible, extended PSW mode from the 370's EC-mode. There are
similarities, but there are enough differences that it'd take some serious
mods to the 370-architecture version of Hercules to support it. (Note that
TSS/360 on suitably equipped /67s provided a 4GB virtual address space,
something IBM didn't do again for another 20 years. I can't comment on
whether that was more than just wishful thinking, but the architectural
support was there.)

> VM/SP ran on a something I met and saw at a local large company.

VM/SP runs on 370s and up, maybe requiring the VM assist special feature.
The non-SP version, VM/370, can run without VM assists. I dunno exactly what
the advantage of VM/SP is, though I seem to recall from the dim recesses of
time that the only way MVS and VMN would coexist really peacefully is to run
the SP version of both.

> I've met and played with the whatever it is that runs on the S/34 and
> S/36. (One of my friends has the 34, I own the 36.) Dunno it's name,
> it's called SSP everywhere I see it.

Not a chance on Hercules. The S/34/36/AS/400 architecture is completely,
totally different, and really weird from what I've been told.

> What else am I missing, and on what did it run?

The other major OS was DOS...like OS, it came in /360, /VS, and SP (named
DOS/VSE and then VSE/SP) flavors as time passed. Incompatible, but smaller
and easier to deal with for small shops. I have no direct experience with
it.

> Oh, and is anything other than OS/360 available without getting a legal
> beating from IBM?

Good question, and one we should find out where to get a definitive answer
for one of these days. IBM didn't start charging license fees for the OS
itself until the SP (== "system product") versions of the OSes, and I, for
one, would like to run the latest version of MVS I can. Getting a copy of
MVS 3.8 might get interesting. Even if we could lay hands on MVS, though, we
should get OS/360 working reliably first, so as to minimize the number of
bugs we tickle at any one time...

9:13 pm

Copyright 2000