An Introduction to "Open for Mainframe"

Open for Mainframe

What do I mean by that? Yes, I have to admit I’m playing on the words a bit.

The obvious play on words is “open for business.” However, I also mean “open source” and other “open” references. I guess I have a passion to say open development has made a big difference to the entire software market and mainframe is not insulated from it. Long ago pundits within the mainframe community talked about proprietary quality related to the cost in development would win over “homegrown” or other references to open source. However, now twenty years later, I would beg to differ on that opinion. Open source community has shown commitment and quality.

The World has Changed

I felt lucky. On one hand, I had over 30 years in mainframe, and yet on the other, I also had distributed computing experience dating back to the early Intel processors.  Back then, we were tinkering with IEEE S-100 bus, then the products started coming: Osborne’s 1, Job’s Apple I, commodore 64, IBM PC, TRS80, etc.  Having both hardware and software programming experience, I was happy to join the others on platforms that the common man could own.  I was in my twenties and working as a system programmer writing assembler code and learning about MVS operating systems.  I had already come up through the ranks as operator and programmer on smaller systems like IBM System/3. Now, I was making a living working in million dollar shops. We were reading memory dumps and writing OS exits for security and usability.  However, for me and my pals, we liked to hobby with the Intel 8088 and writing assembler code for it. Before that, the Intel 8048 chip only had 64 bytes of RAM memory of which 32 was reserved for the registers. The instruction set was lacking. With an adder and complement, you had to write your own routines to do subtraction, multiply, divide, convert to decimal or binary. All the things we took for granted on a CISC mainframe, these earliest little machines required basic microcode. So the Intel 8088 was a great start for those commercial personal computers that used them. (Note: There were other companies like Motorola that had 6800 processor chips that was competing with Intel in these new products). At that time, we never imagined the degree that these little machines would eventually have in the market place.

Work at BMC

Back in 2000, I started at BMC as a mainframe MVS system programmer. Yet, I wanted to get back to doing work I had done earlier, as a consultant, building Compaq servers and supporting Windows NT production environments. Later at BMC, I would eventually meet and work for my manager, Steve Carl, [Adventures in Linux]. It was Steve, who steered me toward Linux and open source. I have to admit, I like it.

Reason for this blog

Yes, the world has changed. I guess I’m older and finding that few if any want to learn about the mainframe these days. Yet many of the technology that was developed for it are being used today by distributed systems. Virtual machines is but one of these technologies. Having had my feet in both worlds, I feel I could share with my reader both what the mainframe did do and what it failed to do.

So what is Open for Mainframe about?

I’m going to pen about z/Linux and z/VM to start off with technical information on these topics. I want to include what the mainframe has to offer and give details into this world for those who would like to learn more about it. Additionally, I was motivated by others here at BMC to talk about their ideas of green technology that the mainframe offers. For example, many have realized that VMware and larger servers with SAN based storage offers cost savings in datacenter size and environmental requirements. These are also the tenets of the mainframe. I want to generate interest in this and show that the mainframe is a viable platform. And finally, for those who are within the mainframe community, I want to bring more information on how open source can help them.