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Comment by znpy | Hacker News Reader

Dumb question: mainframes and z/OS look interesting, how does one get started with learning about those systems and those environments ?

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I'm not a mainframe programmer, but coming from x86 land I was very curious. I really learned a lot from the IBM Coursera "Intro to Mainframe" since none of my experience really applied it was tough. It had a real shell account to practice with though.

https://www.coursera.org/professional-certificates/ibm-z-mai...

Also the MOSHIX mainframe YouTube channel has a lot of info, and helped me setup HERCULES emulator for my own little mainframe experience.

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

Not a dumb question at all! In Europe I’ve seen a few training programs held by companies looking to get new talent in to learn from the older techs. Browse around and see if any companies around you have something like that.

There are some free resources available that will allow you to get training but I haven’t tried them myself. IBM Z Xplore is worth a look as an example: https://www.ibm.com/products/z/resources/zxplore

I hope you find a way in, more mainframe developers and sysadmins(often called systemsprogrammers in the mainframe niche) are always needed.

Edit*: Spelling and grammar

I’ve run through a bunch of ZXplore and it’s more fun than I expected.

They have it hooked in to VS Code now. It’s weirdly modern. And you get to play on a real z machine.

Recommendable summer/holiday tinkering project. It’s amazing how much and yet how little has changed in computing and transaction processing.

There's an emulator called Hercules[1] that lets you run (some) mainframe stuff on a PC. There are limits to what you can run on it though, mostly due to licensing issues with IBM.

You can also look at the IBM Redbooks site[2]. Search for terms like Z/OS, MVS, CICS, DB/2, etc. and you'll find a lot of IBM books, whitepapers (well, they call them redpapers, but whatever) and so on.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_(emulator)

[2]: https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/

I've setup Hercules on my Mac before. Fun tool, since I last touched OS2/MVS 40 years ago. Best part is many of the old OS's (MVT, MVS, vm/370) are all still available since IBM never saw the need to copyright them.

This is a good article on the subject: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/07/the-i...

Great question. I work in the mainframe division of a Fortune 100 company.

The suggestions above are great if you're interested in learning about the technologies used on z/OS.

A vote for zeeframe's recommendation of the IBM Z Xplore course. Great stuff.

If you're looking for more reading material, I'd suggest the O'Reilly book "Modern Mainframe Development" book that covers a range of topics. (https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/modern-mainframe-d...)

If you're looking for an on-the-job training approach that would enable a career change into the mainframe, Broadcom offers something called the Vitality program (https://mainframe.broadcom.com/beyondcode/vitality_program) that runs every year in North America, Europe, and Australia. It's a program that would equip you with serious credentials that could help you land one of those System Programmer jobs or similar.

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