This is apparently greatly over-hyped (or a complete lie, depending on your interpretation) :<p><a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/mainframed767/status/1258018826823729154" rel="nofollow">https://mobile.twitter.com/mainframed767/status/125801882682...</a>
Should probably be a link to the Hercules emulator, since it's the real magic here. <a href="http://www.hercules-390.eu/" rel="nofollow">http://www.hercules-390.eu/</a><p>Even runs current z/OS, though there is no practical legal way to do that.
I find it somewhat ironic that IBM is struggling so hard to find COBOL programmers to keep mainframe alive, but they also insist on locking down z/os to the point that you can't get access to a terminal unless you already know COBOL and work for an enterprise spending millions with IBM.<p>You want nerds to flock to your platform, you have to give them access...
I used to experiment with a Hercules MVS (my first real computer job was sysop at an institutional datacenter with an MVS) on my eeepc on my second tour in Iraq. Doing convoy security, of course we never had any network connection of any kind (it being the middle of the desert and also having active RF-jammers on our guntrucks), and there was always a long wait for the MWR computers at whatever base we'd stopped at for the night, so we were left with only whatever data we could pack before each mission. I spent hours and hours hacking on that thing. It was a pretty absurd situation, but I had a lot of fun.
For a bit more fun with mainframe emulation if you're not already a mainframe programmer, check out MUSIC/SP on the System390 emulator [1]. You can run MUSIC/SP on Hercules also, with some limitations [2].<p>[1] <a href="http://www.canpub.com/teammpg/de/sim390/" rel="nofollow">http://www.canpub.com/teammpg/de/sim390/</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.canpub.com/teammpg/de/sim390/hercnote.txt" rel="nofollow">http://www.canpub.com/teammpg/de/sim390/hercnote.txt</a>
In the meantime, somewhere in the universe, people are buying mainframes ... for personal use: <a href="https://blog.mainframe.dev/2019/05/buying-ibm-mainframe.html" rel="nofollow">https://blog.mainframe.dev/2019/05/buying-ibm-mainframe.html</a>. Go figure! :-)