- #Z OS EMULATOR FOR FREE#
- #Z OS EMULATOR SOFTWARE LICENSE#
- #Z OS EMULATOR SOFTWARE#
- #Z OS EMULATOR MAC#
This would be particularly useful in China and India, where most of the new mainframe pros are being created as the old-time experts in North America and Europe retire.
#Z OS EMULATOR FOR FREE#
While CentOS and Debian Linuxes have supported the z implementation of the Linux kernel, the mainframe variants of Linux from Red Hat and Novell are what nearly all mainframe shops use, and this code is available for free even if the installation and technical support for it is not.Īnother possible use is to have TurboHercules boxes used to train newbie mainframers, rather than real mainframes, which cost millions to tens of millions of dollars. Which, by the way, run fine atop Hercules. And not only for hard-core z/OS workloads, but also for the System z implementations of Linux.
#Z OS EMULATOR SOFTWARE#
TurboHercules obviously wants more than this, and like Platform Solutions and Fundamental Software before it, it can envision a commercial Hercules emulator being used in application testing and development, as well for demonstrating new mainframe applications.
Not as a box for supporting legacy (but not ancient) mainframe operating systems or new ones, but rather as a poor man's disaster recovery for a state or local government, for instance, that these days does not have the budget to buy two System z10 BC mainframes, much less one, but is sitting on older System/390 or zSeries mainframe iron and nonetheless needs some kind of disaster recovery iron if this old kit kicks the bit bucket.
This is why TurboHercules is positioning itself as a provider of 圆4 and Itanium platforms suitable as emergency backup boxes for modern mainframes.
#Z OS EMULATOR SOFTWARE LICENSE#
Very old IBM mainframe operating systems that are in the public domain - including OS/360, DOS/360, DOS/VS, MVS, VM/370, and TSS/370 - can be legally deployed on top of the Hercules emulator.īut all the modern mainframe platforms - z/OS, z/VSE, and z/VM - have license restrictions that do not allow for customers who have versions of the code running on real mainframes to load that software atop Hercules - except for one provision in the IBM software license agreement, according to Miller, that allows for mainframe shops to load their software onto another machine in the event that the box on which it is licensed fails.
#Z OS EMULATOR MAC#
Hercules currently runs on 32-bit x86, 64-bit 圆4, and Itanium processors, and it can itself be deployed on top of Windows, Linux, Mac OS, or Solaris running on those three hardware options. The Hercules emulator can emulate the System/360, the System/370, the ESA/390, and the z architectures. It is distributed under the Q Public License, developed by application development tool maker Trolltech for its Qt tools and since abandoned for the GNU General Public License. The emulator is written in C with a smattering of assembly code where performance is crucial, and actually allows code, operating systems, and other systems software written for many generations of IBM mainframe hardware to run atop other servers. TurboHercules is co-headquartered in Paris, France, where Bowler moved after he left the United Kingdom, and in Seattle, Washington, in close proximity to the one big software company that has in the past taken a shining to anything that gave Big Blue some grief, particularly with mainframes. So, if you are reading this, Cravath, Swaine, and Moore, IBM's New York lawyers, this is not about replacing existing mainframes, but about giving their software a place to run when the mainframe crashes. Rather than go straight at the IBM mainframe base, which many a company has tried to do and ended up in court, TurboHercules is taking an oblique angle of attack on the mainframe base, positioning a commercialized version of the Hercules mainframe emulator as a platform for disaster recovery machine for working mainframes and their software stacks. Roger Bowler - the creator of the open source Hercules mainframe emulator - has put together a company called TurboHercules to try to commercialize the decade-old program that he created as a "programmer's plaything."