Mmmhmmm....OS/360

[RThurmont]

Yes, the title of this thread is a deliberate pun on Stark's thread on Vista's GUI a while back.

I've managed to get OS/360 working in a Hercules emulator, with some difficulty. There was a log file that was not attached properly, that had to be provided.

OS/360, in case you don't know, is a 40 year old mainframe operating system, released around 1965, the delayed development of which inspired the now classic book "The Mythical Man Month." The system is thus four years older than UNIX, and can be run on a modern PC using the Hercules emulator and a freely downloadable turnkey system. The entire OS is in the public domain.

Commands for it are quite a bit cryptic, such as "r 0,u" k,s,del=rd, and so on. It is fun.

The Hercules emulator has an awesome Windows GUI.

Screenshots are coming.

[Bounty]

Does the Windows version have one of those arcade GUI's where you can click the buttons? Those are cool. I used to have an Altair emulator that did that and it was hours of fun just clicking the lights on and off. Well, minutes at least.

Can you store recipes in it, or does it just do accounting?

[RThurmont]

It does, I'm going to post a screenshot after I come back from lunch.

It has 3D buttons, in fact, it even has sound effects.

OS/360 itself can be used for whatever purpose you desire. System/360 hardware, and OS/360 COBOL, were used in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey to simulate HAL 9000.

OS/360 is basically a fully featured, multitasking operating system that can do anything any other multitasking OS can, in fact, it was one of the first modern OSes to appear. It is, arguably, substantially more powerful than MS-DOS in every respect except out-of-the-box graphics capabilities. OS/360 was designed to be used with 3270 terminals (with monitors!) and 3215 console printers. There are text editors for it.

My current objective is to get TSO working, once its up, it should be possible to use the system in a more or less normal interactive manner.

[Bounty]

Is TSO command-line only or is there a menu system? That'd be interesting to see.

[Bounty]

Odd. I try starting the GUI and it complains about fish.

[RThurmont]

Initial screenshot.

The above is a screenshot I took last night, before I had the system fully IPLing properly. You'll note that the OS/360 unit had in fact IPLed, but was effectively "stuck" due to various line printers that it requires not being fully attached.

I'm going to take another screenshot of it shortly.

EDIT:

[img=http://img181.imageshack.us/img181/1543 ... xh2.th.png]

The above depicts the system fully IPLed. The window on the right is the Hercules GUI console. The upper window on the left shows the wc3270 emulator connected (via a telnet-like protocol) to port 0014, serving as the ASP terminal, and the lower window shows another wc3270 connected to 0010 as the system terminal. When first started, you work with the system terminal on 0010, then switch to the ASP terminal on 0014, on this particular OS/360 configuration.

Odd. I try starting the GUI and it complains about fish.

Fish is the alias of Mr. Trout, the hacker who created the GUI. You need to download his Fishlib. All the info you need is on his page, here, or you can PM me for more info (I can give you my AIM SN, if its no longer on my public profile, and we can communicate via it). One more edit: In response to Bounty ... y awesome.

[RThurmont]

Well, with some difficulty, I got TSO up and running (and in the process learned several additional system commands).




The window at the top is running the TSO session, whereas the window at the bottom is the OS control prompt. In the TSO prompt, system text is red, and user text is green.

Apparently Hercules also allows time travel, as the system is under the impression that today is January 19th, 1980.