[ Thanks to Fred Mobach
for this report: ]
“I am a lucky person who can read monthly the German Linux
Magazin. In their number 06/2000 they ran a story “Pinguin im
Mainframe Land”. No need to translate this for you ? At this time
you don’t need to take a look at their side http://www.linux-magazin.de/ as
the articles shows up after the presentation of the next
volume.
You are not surprised that it’s a story on Linux on IBM’s S/390
mainframes. You have already seen a lot of these stories here so I
wouldn’t bother you with this one if it had not a funny ending.
For those of us who know how computers work it’s always the
question how does it work the other way around.
Afterall, running a mainframe OS on top of Unix was not unknown to
me. In 1985 Siemens representatives showed at a meeting of the
Siemens Computer User Group (SICOG) one of their Unix computer
systems with their mainframe operating system BS2000 running under
their Unix version. The system was called PC2000.
Now in the story of Linux Magazine the Hercules project was
mentioned. This project offers you the possibility to run IBM’s
mainframe operating systems in emulation mode under GNU/Linux. No
need to mention that GNU/Linux runs on many platforms ? But be
aware, for most of those OS’es you need a license. Only the OS/360
seems to be “public domain”.
And also the license of Hercules is a bit restrictive, you can use
it for your own personal non-commercial educational and hobby use.
You can read more at http://www.snipix.freeserve.co.uk/hercules.htm.
I’ve spent some time with reading the sources of Hercules. They
contain valuable comments and it’s fun to read those. Perhaps you
enjoy it also :-).”