News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Release of GnuCOBOL 2.2. Parent comment

Re:Release of GnuCOBOL 2.2 by rbanffy on Thursday September 07, 2017 @03:13PM (#15194853)
I'd love to see z/OS being licensed for hobbyists. I'm very curious about mainframes, but I don't have the space to get myself a used zSeries.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Release of GnuCOBOL 2.2 by skissane on Thursday September 07, 2017 @08:47PM (#15197090)
I would also love to see a z/OS hobbyist program. Sadly, I doubt IBM is ever going to do it (but you never know).

In the meantime, anyone can download and run the public domain MVS 3.8J, it is ancient but it includes a lot of the basic technologies of z/OS (JCL, JES2, VSAM, VTAM, TSO, 3270, etc), just in much older versions (essentially 1970s vintage).

I think TK4- is the easiest way to run it: http://wotho.ethz.ch/tk4-/

I believe TK4- includes the MVT COBOL compiler from 1972 (which was the last COBOL compiler version IBM released into the public domain), although I've never tried it myself.

[ Parent | on HN ]