Hercules
  370/390 Emulator - Introduction

Introduction

Hercules ist a software emulation for the IBM S/370 and S/390 hardware architecture. Hercules runs on Linux (other flavours of UNIX ar also reported to be compatible with it) and also on the windows (32 bit) operating systems. It's the ideal toy for everyone who always dreamed about having an IBM mainframe computer at home.

Since the /370 architecture is compatible with the older /360 architecture, Hercules can also run operating systems designed for this platform. During the summer 2000 the Hercules Community has managed to make OS/360 MVT available - and gave excellent support and documentation for installing and running it. In November 2000 VM/370 became available as well and in early January 2001 finally MVS 3.8 became available.

These pages are a small contribution to this community. I started with some beginner's information (or refreshers) on "How-To" topics of OS/360 MVT (TSO) here. Since I've now turned my head to MVS, I will probably no longer enhance this (also MVT is really worth to be shown in a software museum ...). But as it is more fun and less painful (really?) I'll focus on MVS topics for now ...

I joined the S/3x0 community 1983 - at a time when OS/360 was history and the MVS 3.8 had just started to disappear (I started with the MVS/XA - MVS SP V2R1Mx opsys). However, many of the things you can do with MVS 3.8 or even The S/360 MVT can be done with OS/390 Version 2 Release 10 today in the same way - and that almost 30 years later!

Even many assembler programs (remember: "machine language is bad because it will not be usable on newer systems...") will still be executable - in object/load module format! This is quite an impressive prove of what IBM means with "protecting customer's investments".

Getting in contact with the 360 world helped me to understand many things that are still availalble/tru in today's OS390 V2R10 world ...