I am kind of annoyed that I am just now learning about how mainframes are designed in 2022, at a time when it is IMPOSSIBLE to dip a toe into the water without already having a job doing the work.
No free developer OS distributions or licenses, (so no way to run them on an emulator), no freely available emulators for modern hardware & OS releases, nothing.
Mainframe vendors, I feel, are kind of shooting themselves in the foot with this "screw the developers, they gotta PAY" mentality around this insanely expensive mainframe kit. How am I ever to learn this stuff well enough to advocate for it at work, if I can't use it and learn it in my own time? This feels like step 0 in trying to bring users to a platform, dying or not.
This article and others all show that a lot of the capabilities and redundancy requirements that we are trying to develop in PC architectures (amd64, arm64 & RISCV; are there more?) have been present in mainframes for decades, and that's an exciting thing to learn, not just because I want to write software that runs on reliable hardware, but because as a nerd this is... like ...TURBO interesting!
IBM and HP just block any newbies from doing anything of value because they're stuck in 1960s & 1970s pricing paradigms back when mainframes were all there was, so you HAD to pay if you wanted to compute at scale.
This whole situation bothers me. This is very neat technology and it's behind a massive paywall that no end-user could ever afford without a very large windfall.
Distro:
Update to Distro:
http://www.prince-webdesign.nl/index.php/software/update-on-...
Emulator:
https://github.com/SDL-Hercules-390/hyperion
It's a MVS TK4- distribution and probably 99% of a z/OS functionality plus it's Public Domain.
Or VM/370 another Public Domain OS from IBM:
Or even better you run MVS TK4- inside VM/370...for the real taste ;)
But if you really really want z/OS (i have no clue why you would do that) you click here:
https://www.ibm.com/it-infrastructure/z/education/zxplore
(Formerly know as Master the Mainframe)
And some yt's to have a little base-knowledge (mostly MVS and VM/370):