Welcome to TurboHercules!

by Roger Bowler
Creator of Hercules and Co-founder of TurboHercules

April 24, 2009

When I began writing Hercules in May 1999, it was intended to be a system programmer’s plaything. Little did I expect that, 10 years later, and thanks to the power of open source, Hercules would have grown into a robust, production-capable platform comparable in performance to a low-end modern mainframe.

The mainframe world has seen many changes over those 10 years. The plug-compatible manufacturers Fujitsu-Amdahl and Hitachi exited the market in the year 2000, other mainframe emulation products have come and gone, and the audacious startup Platform Solutions was swallowed by IBM in 2008. Now only Hercules remains as the alternative platform for running mainframe software.

With increasing numbers of smaller customers asking how they can keep their mainframe running for regulatory and other reasons, without upgrading to expensive hardware and operating systems, the time was ripe to launch a commercial offering based on Hercules. TurboHercules was formed to provide such companies with commercial support for a Hercules based solution for their ancillary mainframe workloads. TurboHercules is independent of the Hercules project, which remains firmly an open-source product owned and maintained by its individual contributors.

One of the first challenges for TurboHercules will be to obtain a satisfactory licensing arrangement which will permit current mainframe operating systems to be run on commodity OEM hardware (as was the case up until the year 2000). This will benefit not only Hercules users but any other OEM which may choose to enter the market. These are going to be interesting times for the mainframe.