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Comment by r2sk5t | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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