This is an introduction to getting IBM’s OS/360 operating system loaded and running on the Hercules emulator for the System/370, ESA/390, and z/Architecture systems. It assumes you have some familiarity with the 370, and with OS; in particular, you need to have some understanding of JCL, and of OS/360 (or later versions, like MVS or OS/390) usage and operation. It does not purport to be an introduction to the world of the 370.
This is a bit more complicated to set up than just about any other emulator or VM out there. A great weekend project for people with the right skill set and inclination.
An Interview with Fred Brooks
https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/11/193333-an-interview-with-fred-brooks/fulltext
“If we had been smart, we would also have done a schedule-time mode of PL/I instead of doing JCL, the Job Control Language. But we weren’t smart. The worst mistake we made was JCL. Its existence was a mistake. Building it on a card format was a mistake. Building it on assembly language was a mistake. Thinking of it as only six little control cards instead of a language was a mistake, because it had no proper subroutine facilities, no proper branching facilities. That we did not see it as a language was the fundamental problem; we saw it as a set of control cards.”
ACM fellow Frederick (“Fred”) Brooks, recipient of the 1999 A.M. Turing Award, has made landmark contributions to computer architecture, operating systems, and software engineering. After earning a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from Harvard under the legendary Howard Aiken, he worked for IBM on several landmark computer systems, most notably the System/360 series that came to dominate mainframe computing for decades. He left IBM in 1964 to found the Computer Science Department at the University of North Carolina, from which he retired at the end of the Spring 2015 semester.
Back in a prior life (well late 1980’s, early 1990’s) I worked in an IBM mainframe environment. I remember JCL – not enough to be of any use anymore. It was at a failed Savings & Loan. Out of the 3 shifts of many operators I was the only one left for a couple years until the powered it all down and sent everybody on their way.