I thought this was a good intro into z/OS. I had been playing with MVS on Hercules, and I wanted to have some idea on how MVS and z/OS differed. Is MVS so old that I’m wasting my time learning it? Other than obvious improvements over the years, I found the biggest differentiator is the …
Category Archives: Hercules
Another 3270 terminal emulator
Just to be complete I thought I’d mention another freely available 3270 terminal emulator on Linux. I briefly tried the c3270, 3270 terminal emulator, it is easy to increase/decrease the font size simply by pressing <Ctrl>+ or – respectively. The thing that wasn’t readily clear to me was how to use special keys such as …
x3270 Terminal Emulator fonts
I really needed larger fonts for the Master the Mainframe course. I used the default x3270 many times using the Hercules emulator but for some reason the smaller font really bothered me in this course. Watched “Setting up x3270 on Linux”, a YouTube video where a guy installed with apt then easily changed the font …
Greenbar, almost done?
I changed the first print line to start lower on the form for better looking alignment. I also finally figured out how to use the python module PyPDF2 to crop a little off the left side of the form (thanks to a YouTube video) for better symmetry as well as removing the pesky 1st blank …
More S/370 Assembler
Watching myself stomp all over storage as I re-familiarize myself with IBM mainframe Assembler. Playing with simple packed and register arithmetic. I really like the SNAP macro for looking at registers & storage.
Hercules/MVS (card image exceeds maximum 80)
Finally solved a nagging Hercules/MVS problem that has had me stumped for days (card image exceeds maximum 80). After watching the YouTube video… “MVS 3.8 or z_OS – Installing and using the Assist Assembler – M17” which documents Jay Mosley’s Assist Assembler install procedure. I decided I wanted to do the same with 1 exception…I …
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IBM COBOL program fix
Fixed sort04.cob amounts and arithmetic on those fields after figuring out how…again, how IBM COBOL works with these fields. It was working but not displaying amount fields and I had left it that way until I understood why. By working I mean producing output and running to completion. So I guess I should really say …
COBOL numeric fields
I mentioned here something odd and confusing to me. So played with it and certainly can work around it. However I still find it strange that in IBM COBOL, at least this very old version, I can’t move a field defined as 999.99 to another field defined as 999.99. I guess the answer simply is …
parseJob
Modified parseJob, my Hercules local prt file extractor (see here) to also parse prt00f.txt. For me prt00e.txt is most useful. There’s also a prt002.txt file, but I didn’t process because I haven’t seen it’s output yet.
More greenbar?
Even though I said this wasn’t a high priority, I did some more work on my greenbar program. Seems to do a pretty fair job. Not exactly an example of my finest programming skills. A lot of trial and error rather than properly understanding the process. I think I understood it better a few years …