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Comment by klelatti | Hacker News Reader

This is intriguing! What was the market for this machine? The PC and mainframe seem so different in their likely users.

Mainframes are expensive and busy running production workloads. Offloading development and test to franken-PC's running 370 emulation had large cost saving potential. Plus, back in those days the IBM sales organization had a ton of power and could sell anything, the margins were always fantastic, and large numbers of sales reps earned more than the IBM CEO.

Thanks! This makes a lot of sense. I worked for an IBM marketing unit in the 1980s so saw some of this up close!

Why suffer with MS-DOS when you could run VM/370 on your PC?

IBM still sells emulators, now software-based, for companies that do mainframe software development. And they are freakishly expensive.

For the rest of us, there is Hercules!

http://www.hercules-390.org/

True, but there's no legal way to run z/OS on it.

I used to be involved in Mini sales (System 36). Selling DOS based PCs was a doddle compared to these singularly sluggish and ridiculously heavy machines.

I'm not sure VM/370 is less suffering. For example, I run MVS in the typical old 3.8j version (the last public domain one, from I think 1981) as an enthusiast, and it's just amazing how little abstraction there was. MS-DOS practically cuddles you, having an actual file system!

it's just amazing how little abstraction there was

That was deliberate and made a lot of sense. The functionality was split between two programs. The VM/370 part emulates the raw machine. CMS is the "operating system" on top of the VM "hardware".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversational_Monitor_System

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