I was never a mainframe guy, except for doing a lot of programming on them in fortran and pascal back in the old days at college and graduate school.

My brother now... he was a mainframe guy. Ken worked for several large banks in the Boston/Cambridge, MA area, programming in everything from JCL to Cobol to RPG. He was a wiz at managing large IBM computers and loved that whole environment.

For Christmas last year, gave him a complete implementation of an IBM mainframe in emulation, including the MVS operating system. It's called Hercules.

Who knew!

Unfortunately, his health has been poor, and I can't report on installing and using this stuff, but that's a different story. I had hoped to playaround and learn a bit of it myself, but may never get around to it.

The package I put together for him has lots of documentation plus complete binaries for running your own mainframe under WinDoze. It even includes the letter I wrote to Ken as part of the Christmas present :)

The coolness factor in this package is huge, and if I were a mainframe guy, I'd be all over it.

So I just uploaded it here and encourage anyone who understands or wants to play with mainframes to give it a go! And please let us know how it turns out.

-Tom

I met Andy Spencer, Administrator (Owner?) of the Retro Computer Museum in Leicestershire, UK online last night. I was a little reluctant to ask him if it was ok to post about our site on his site, but he had no problem with it.

Readers of this post should browse over to the Retro Computer Museum and say hello. He's got a great community and lots of fellow retro fans talking about all manner of old, geeky stuff, with a distinctly British flair.

Altogether, the Retro Computer Museum is a great site with a lot of information about old hardware and software, and I foresee a strong friendship between our communities in the future.

-Tom

I've just upgraded the server to ConcourseConnect 1.0.1, released yesterday.

While we think it works great, there might be a few bugs. If you find them, please report them using "Contact Us" at the top right. This version has numerous bug fixes, and adds a new theme, which I am not using.

Read on for a summary of the changes/fixes...