The worst part is that I fundamentally had it working for years, not realizing that it was crashing on the mainframe side, as I was just a user, and know very little about the OS level stuff on the mainframe side.

I for sure would be interested in hearing about the whole thing!

Look around you will find copies of OS/390 ADCD. OS/390 is probably closer to what you want – it is 90s vintage, only 31-bit. The “OS/390 V1R2 ADCD” is only 800MB. Not sure exactly what year that was, but V1R1 was 1995 and V2R6 was 1998 so V1R2 would have been somewhere in-between. That’s the oldest licensed version that is publicly available, AFAIK.

Don’t worry- compressing the CKDs (which is something Hercules supports, but zPDT doesn’t) brings them down from 110 to about 40 GB’s. z/OS is so familiar to MVS 3.8j yet so different in many ways- it offers a POSIX compatibility environment called OMVS where most of the newer, “modern” products actually run (such as WebSphere, ZOSMF, Java (version 6 with V1R11) & even TCP/IP). I even got a Minecraft classic (0.30) server to run on it once, under zPDT! And it performed okay! (Much better than with Hercules…)

That’s far too much to get into… 110gb?! I can’t even handle MVS 3.8!

Also I don’t care about tcpip and all that new fangled crap, I just want SNA, you know the good old 802.2 / LU6.2 PU2 stuff.

I did manage to find out that IBM & Microsoft SNA server stuff crashes out the old SNA stack. But this copy of Extra! 4.2 does the job just fine.

And since i’m doing the dlsw thing, I need to use that one off build of hercules.. 😐

Thanks anyways.

I would, but the extracted CKD’s alone (uncompressed) are ~110 GBs… The download is at https://archive.org/details/rdz-unit-test-v-803-desktop-install. On the link I gave above (the BetaArchive one) there is a configuration on the first post, copy that and save it to a text file, it could be called “hercules.cnf”. Download the ISOs from archive.org and extract the .GZ files from the SYSzSWdist CD set (1-7) into an empty directory. The extracted files should be extensionless and be about ~2 GBs (with some exceptions being either 1 or 4). Then, install the new version of Hercules maintained by SoftDevLabs from https://github.com/SDL-Hercules-390/hyperion (prebuilt for Windows, you can build it yourself on Linux). Use the included dasdcopy64 tool and a for loop in cmd to convert all the extracted files into compressed CKDs using: dasdcopy64 -z -o cckd64 -lfs (infile) (infile).cckd. Delete the old files and put *.cckd with the same directory as the cnf file. Launch hercules with: hercules -f (config file). Run sf+* from the console (only do this the first time you start), connect a TN3270 to localhost:3270 (set the LU to 0700 which makes it the system console) and then run ipl 0a80. Type R 00,I in the 3270 console to proceed with startup (it’ll only ask this the first time) Also make sure to read rdzutconfig.html, which can be found on RDzUnitTest_v803_QSG.ISO/Documentation/en/HTML/. It documents a lot of things you’ll need to do to configure the system. By default, it’ll auto-IPL with the loadparm CS (cold start), which should always be the first LOADPARM you use when you bring up a system for the first time (as it assures that JES2 is properly initialized) but when you shutdown, you can edit the cnf file to replace the line that says LOADPARM 0A82CS with LOADPARM 0A82(LP), with (LP) being any LOADPARM valid on the included rdzutconfig.html (I recommend setting it to LOADPARM 0A82AC to start everything. Then use a TN3270 emulator to connect to localhost:3270 (with LU set to 0701) to access the system. Then you can read the included documentations to proceed with setting up TCP/IP and connecting a console through network. Have fun and let me know if you have any questions!

if you can send me one that is setup, and walk through how to do it…

I can barely logon to TSO. I just figured out how to find and edit text files on MVS a few days ago lol

I’ve never heard of it. does it support 3705’s and sdlc?