Re: EBCDIC is available on x86 platforms

On 2014-04-25 11:03, Karl Williamson wrote:
> I discovered that Fujitsu makes a form of their EBCDIC OS BS2000/OSD for 
> x86 machines. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BS2000/OSD
>
> It would seem to me that an organization that really wants Perl EBCDIC 
> support to continue would easily have the means to devote an x86 as a 
> smoker machine. Without a commitment for a smoker, the plug will soon be 
> pulled on Perl support.
Not exactly…those machines are running emulator code (called X2000) that 
emulates the System/390 instruction set, very similar to the IBM zPDT or 
Hercules. The same emulation was introduced sooner for SPARC-based platforms 
that Fujitsu and predecessors used.

 From the 8.0A release notice (revised Nov. 2013): "BS2000/OSD-BC V8.0 
supports the new SQ100 servers of the SQ series with Intel X86 architecture 
as the hardware basis. As with the SX servers, the hardware abstraction 
layer X2000 is required in order to run BS2000/OSD and its applications 
which, with the new SQ servers, are based on Linux."

Another question as far as BS2000/OSD goes: has Perl been ported as a 
command-line tool to BS2000/OSD? And if so, can a system be made available, 
even if it's from Fujitsu themselves?

Some have ported GCC to the MVS 3.8j operating system, which is the most 
recent supported OS operating system legally allowed to run on Hercules. 
Alas, there is no UNIX System Services there, since that dates from the 
early 1980s, before licensing reared its (ugly) head in the IBM mainframe world.

Aside: I've always wondered if BS2000/OSD could run under Hercules. If 
anyone could assist in running this as an experiment, even with an older 
version, please drop me a line off-list.


-- 
M. Ray Mullins
Roseville, CA, USA
http://www.catherdersoftware.com/

German is essentially a form of assembly language consisting entirely of far calls heavily accented with throaty guttural sounds. ---ilvi
French is essentially German with messed-up pronunciation and spelling.  --Robert B Wilson
English is essentially French converted to 7-bit ASCII.  ---Christophe Pierret [for Alain LaBonté]

• EBCDIC is available on x86 platforms by Karl Williamson
• Re: EBCDIC is available on x86 platforms by Ray Mullins