Open Mainframe Project

Looking into The COBOL Training Course, an open source initiative under the Open Mainframe Project.

Saw a YouTube video titled “COBOL Fridays – Get hands-on – Run a COBOL program”
Which talks about running COBOL on a z/OS.
It requires …
VS Code for COBOL development which I’m already using for COBOL on my MVS emulator and GnuCOBOL.
Also needed the following…
IBM Z® Open Editor – VS Code extension.
Zowe Explorer – VS Code extension.
Node.js – sudo pacman -Syu nodejs
Java – by installing JDK [You won’t see if you search for Java!] from pamac GUI. Which also installed JRE.

Got everything setup then found I needed to…register “COBOL Programming with VSCode Registration”
After completing this I received an important email with info I needed to connect to IBM z/OS system

One thing initially confusing to me while following the video was the “User name” reference. In the email it’s called “Your personal Mainframe ID”. This might be obvious to some but as a person who is use to taking computer things litterly…it wasn’t to me.

I started second guessing myself as to did I forget creating a “billb” user name at signup?

So I completed the compile example in the video and after all these years I used “IBM Enterprise COBOL for z/OS 6.3.0 P200319”