Show HN: Fun things to do with your VM/370 machine

Summary

Fun things to do with your VM/370 machine Intro This page assumes you have a machine (emulated or not) running the VM370 Community Edition OS available. There are a couple ways to get one, and you might want to choose the one that appeals to you the most (or the one that’s less work - it’s up to you). Note: This is still very incomplete - I am accepting suggestions of other fun things to do. With Docker This assumes you have Docker installed. If you do, you can just issue a shell command to have your own machine. docker run -n vm370 -p 3270:3270 rbanffy/vm370ce This will bring up the machine and display the Hercules console on your terminal. With Hercules If you don’t have Hercules installed on your machine, you can install it on any civilised operating system with its package manager GUI. If you want a command-line shortcut, use something like: sudo dnf install sdl-hercules Package name and version varies depending on which operating system you are using. If you are on Windows, you’ll need to find the installer - start from the GitHub repo. Then you’ll need to set up the VM370 environment. The website at vm370.org details the process. With that taken out of our way, we can start to have fun. Logging on For normal things, we’ll log on to the CMSUSER VM, or, if you renamed it, to your own VM. The default password is “CMSUSER”: On the banner screen, press ENTER. The screen will clear. You can then enter logon cmsuser: And enter the password, “cmsuser”: As expected, the password isn’t shown. The red cursor means that. You can also logon using LOGON CMSUSER CMSUSER, typing the password after the user name, but that horrifies me even more than having the username as the password. Back when VM/370 was invented, intrusions were a lot less of a problem than they are now. Please do not expose your VM/370 mainframe directly on the internet. At this point, you are logged on. When you press ENTER another time, a program, called “PROFILE EXEC” will be run: We can examine it. Not...