I develop Algol 68 Genie mainly on Debian. To test releases, I keep a "zoo" with operating systems as FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Raspberry Pi OS installed on virtual machines running on top of Debian. Virtualisation began half a century ago as a method of sharing mainframe resources between different operating systems, applications or users.

A well-known example was VM/370 which derived from CP/CMS from the 1960s. The concept was elegant - a mainframe is an expensive resource, so to accommodate different operating systems or many users or servers, the actual machine is virtualised to present itself as many individual machines. Virtualisation works efficiently when a computer emulates itself, and that is what VM/370 did - run many virtual IBM 370's on one physical IBM 370. For timesharing users VM came with the Conversational Monitor System CMS, a small but robust single-user shell. It was the system I worked on when I was a student, and I have fond memories of it. Needless to say that the VM/370 heritage lives on up to the present day in z/VM, as MVS lives on in z/OS.

What is the status of these Jurassic operating systems? The predecessor of MVS, MVT is in the public domain. VM releases through VM/370 Release 6 were open source, and are now also considered to be in the public domain. Since MVS 3.8 was available for order directly from IBM as a no charge product, several Hercules users obtained MVS 3.8J from IBM and made available not only distribution tapes, but even turnkey systems like TK4- for use with Hercules.

For several years I have been using MVS with ALGOL68C on a "hobby mainframe" for use as a reference for Algol 68 Genie. Next to MVS, people have been working on resurrecting VM/370 Release 6, and over time several implementations have come and gone. I built an emulation based on professor René Ferland's nifty vm6pext release. The only guest is MVS, that I based on a version that derives from TK4- but was modified by Bob Polmanter to behave well on VM, for instance by spooling job output to the CMS user who scheduled the job.

In part I constructed a VM emulation just for having the satisfaction of being a privileged user - albeit a lonely user - on VM, something unthinkable in the 1980's on the real thing. Below is its VM logon screen as displayed on CRT (Cool-Retro-Terminal), a terminal emulator that mimics vintage cathode-ray tube screens. This display takes me back to the terminal room at the Nijmegen academic computer center in the 1980's.

Marcel van der Veer

My main research subject in the 1980's concerned computational chemistry. Most code I wrote in Nijmegen was in now vintage but back then modern Fortran on VM/370 and later VM/SP. For some time I ranked among the heavy users of the university's computer center, which I thought was kind of cool. Recently, a VM/370 distribution has been made available that should become a community edition of this vintage system. It makes CMS usable again by adding for instance a full-screen editor, the FORTRAN H compiler and much more. Hence I did not think very long before deciding to give the VM/370 community edition a whirl and migrate my vm6pext setup.

On a modern workstation my emulated system runs circa an order of magnitude faster than the real iron of the 1980's, and I do not have to share it with 150 other timesharing users, which was a common workload at the time. I really doubt whether my workstation could handle 150 interactive users but at the time hardware handled that load. This still is an impressive feat, a consequence of the optimized design of every aspect of a mainframe. The CPU was one component of many, the spider in a web of autonomous equipment such as channel processors or peripheral controllers - north- and southbridges avant la lettre, but campus-wide.

On this community edition, I installed as guest operating systems MVS, MVT, VM/370 (VM can run itself and used to be developed this way), and UTS (a Unix system for VM). For much of this, there are tutorials on the moshix channel.

I reconfigured VM's kernel giving MVS direct access to memory to avoid double paging which is a performance sink when MVS runs on top of VM. Once VM is up, I boot MVS (sorry, ipl MVS) from within a telnet session connected to VM as described below. The VIRTUAL=REAL notification means that double paging is avoided.

$ telnet s370 3270
Trying 127.0.1.1....
Connected to s370.

    VM/370 ONLINE

logon mvs ********
STORAGE IS VIRTUAL=REAL
LOGON AT 21:30:00 GMT FRIDAY 05/07/21
 
CP

ipl 148
IEA101A SPECIFY SYSTEM PARAMETERS FOR RELEASE 03.8 .VS2

Once MVS has booted you can DIAL into MVS using a 3270 terminal emulator, and you will be greeted by my personal TSO logon screen:

 MVS/370 Online                                                         
 
 
 
                          VV        VV    MM        MM                    
                          VV        VV    MMM      MMM                    
                   3333333333     777777777777    MM00000000              
                  333333333333    77777777777MM  MM0000000000             
                  33      VV33    77VV    77  MMMM00MM      00            
                           V33     VV    77M   MM 00MM      00            
                            33    VV    77MM      00MM      00            
                         3333VV  VV    77 MM      00MM      00            
                         3333 VVVV     77 MM      00MM      00     _      _    
                            33 VV      77 MM      00MM      00  ." \\`.  (v)   
                            33         77         00        00 ( \\ \\_\_ )\   
                  33        33         77         00        00  \\ _"  //\  )  
                  333333333333         77          0000000000    `/ // /// /
                   3333333333          77           00000000     (//  .__-"    
                                                                   "-" \\      
 
 
 Enter logon userid [reconnect]                                         
 ====>                                                                         
                                                            RUNNING   VM370CE   

On the MVS guest I installed ALGOL68C. Since the system permits scheduling MVS batch jobs from CMS, I can run ALGOL68C as CMS user in batch mode. Perhaps one day somebody will recover A68C or FLACC for CMS, however for my purposes running batch jobs suffices. I prepare JCL batch files for MVS on CMS with the full screen editor, for instance below trivial A68C program:

File: FACT     A68C     A1  RECFM: F LRECL:  72(80) Lines:    10 Current:    10 
                                                                                
===== * * * Top of file * * *                                                   
===== //FACT JOB 1,MARCEL,MSGCLASS=A                                            
===== //FACT EXEC A68CCG                                                        
===== //A68.SYSIN DD *                                                          
===== BEGIN PROC fac = (INT n) INT: (n <= 0 | 1 | n * fac (n - 1));             
=====       FOR k TO 10                                                         
=====       DO print(k, fac (k), new line)                                      
=====       OD                                                                  
===== END                                                                       
===== /*                                                                        
      ....+....1....+....2....+....3....+....4....+....5....+....6....+....7..  
=====                                                                           
      * * * Bottom of file * * *                                                
                                                                                
===>                                                                            
Unchanged                                                 EE V1.2.5,  1 File(s) 

A more complex JCL file is below, that runs a segmented A68C program, with source files stored on MVS:

File: CLUSTRUN JCL      A1  RECFM: F LRECL:  72(80) Lines:    62 Current:     9
                                                                                
===== * * * Top of file * * *
===== //CLUSTER JOB (1),MARCEL,CLASS=A,MSGCLASS=A,MSGLEVEL=(1,1),             
===== //        USER=MARCEL,PASSWORD=********
===== //SCRATCH EXEC PGM=IEFBR14
===== //CLUSTER DD DSN=MARCEL.CLUSTER.ENV,DISP=(MOD,DELETE,DELETE),           
===== //           UNIT=3375,VOL=SER=PUB001
===== //*
===== //* EXAMPLE OF RUNNING A SEGMENTED ALGOL68C PROGRAM.
===== //*
      ....+....1....+....2....+....3....+....4....+....5....+....6....+....7.. 
===== //* ENVIRON
===== //A68ENV   EXEC PGM=A68C,REGION=768K
===== //STEPLIB  DD DSN=A68CLIB.MOD,DISP=SHR
===== //INIT     DD DSN=A68CLIB.SYS(INIT),DISP=SHR
===== //SYSENV   DD DSN=A68CLIB.SYS,DISP=SHR
===== //CODE     DD UNIT=SYSDA,DISP=(NEW,PASS,DELETE),
===== //            SPACE=(CYL,(1,1),RLSE)
===== //ENVOUT   DD DSN=MARCEL.CLUSTER.ENV(CLUSTER1),DISP=(NEW,PASS,DELETE),  
===== //            SPACE=(CYL,(1,1,1)),DCB=RECFM=VB,
===== //            UNIT=3375,VOL=SER=PUB001
===>  
Unchanged                                                 EE V1.2.5,  1 File(s)

I submit JCL files from CMS to MVS and fetch the output when the job finishes:

submvs clustrun jcl
PUN FILE 1894  TO  MVS      COPY 01 NOHOLD
Ready; T=0.01/0.01 22:37:05
PRT FILE 1895 FROM MVS      COPY 01 NOHOLD
readcard clustrun listing
RECORD LENGTH IS '132' BYTES.
Ready; T=0.02/0.06 22:46:15

Next to running ALGOL68C, I use VM/CMS for the preservation of vintage Fortran code for computer simulations in chemical physics, and vintage statistical stuff. But that is a story for a future post .

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© 2002-2024 J.M. van der Veer (jmvdveer@xs4all.nl)