> a somewhat clunky DOS

And the Community Edition even has a handy DIR command for you.

This document has a lot of things left to add - the machines can really be a lot more interesting. So far, I haven't figured out how to connect my real printer over the network, the other machine with shared disks but no OS, and even creating a new VM for our user. I also know there are a lot of other interesting things on the base CE image that can be super cool to show a newcomer.

It is a very cool operating system. I had the pleasure of configuring it (in it’s ibm z/VM form) from scratch a few years ago. However due to company politics it only ran for 2 years. If you are based anywhere in the US you could probably make a career out of it. If you are in Europe I don’t know if it is a wise choice. Not much z/VM there. If you now own a modern mainframe and want to run Linux workload for example I think you are better of using kvm. However if you need to run z/OS virtualised your only option is still z/VM

I have recently played with a plain VM/370 R6 and it's very bare compared to CE - not even bold in the terminal to highlight your current line in EDIT. I was thinking of adding it to my collection of Docker images, but I need to play with tape images and, perhaps, load a bunch of them into the container image so there is something to do with it that resembles modern computing.

> not even bold in the terminal to highlight your current line in EDIT

CMS EDIT was designed when the 3277 was the standard terminal. Those things had a SYSTEM AVALIABLE indicator on the center of the right side of the screen, outside the text area. That was the current-libe marker! When the 3278 came out, all the indicators moved to before the text area, but by then, everyone had moved to EDGAR or XEDIT.

I'm guessing neither EDGAR and XEDIT fall into the friendly license of VM/370...

They do not. That's why we have EE.

You probably could make a career out of it in the US, but it would take a lot of luck. I see mainframe jobs come up every once in a while--they want a ton of experiences, specifically with mainframes and preferably in their industry. I always thought it would be kind of cool but I have no idea how one would break into it.

Generally speaking, students break into it via ISV (independent software vendors, the big ones in this space are IBM and Broadcom but there are many others) apprenticeship and training programs, before getting deployed on site (or staying at the software vendor if you are very good or they have need of somebody junior for a position).

The extreme experience requirements are generally exaggerations. They only happen to exist because there are people who really do have those many years in this field. But I've gotten jobs (I'm a systems programmer, many hats style, z/OS and Linux and C and JCL and Shell and REXX etc) and I've gotten jobs before from these sorts of excessive experience postings before despite me being fairly new to the field (just reaching senior level, about 5 years experience in my subdiscipline, which is systems programming, as opposed to applications programming or security, two other primary specializations for people with CS degrees, there is also operations and IT work available for mainframes but probably the pay rate would be of no interest to somebody on HackerNews).