MVS & DOS/VS screenshot

Running under VM/370 CE at the same time. Full consoles. Notice the different style 3270 MVS console. You can see compile/link/go on both consoles. The screenshot would be better if I didn’t use model 5 (wide) terminals for DOS/VS. Model 5 really only makes sense for the TK4- screen. You know where you might want to look at at wide listing or dataset.

Notice the non standalone MVS (TK4-), 3270 console. It looks a little different in what you usually see on a “regular TK4- console running on the Hercules console. “The green characters in the background on the left is the VM/370 CE console.

MVS console on 3270 is confusing

OK, I was confused about the MVS IPL on a 3270. This drove me crazy yesterday. I seemed to be able to logon HERC1 and submit jobs. But D A,L didn’t show very many process up. How can this be. Well come to find out it has to do with how the 3270, displays messages…it’s different. Perhaps it’s a TK4- thing? My MVS operations skills are very weak. Press PF8 which does a K D,F to display the rest of the messages. So D A,L wasn’t showing all the running systems (if that’s the correct term). VTAM and JES2 were up. At this point I’m not really sure what I’m talking about. But it has to do with areas on the screen and something called Roll Delete. You can manipulate this with various Console K commands.

BTW. This is a good 3270 startup for a console (larger fonts)…

x3270 -model 3279-2 -efont 3270-20 127.0.0.1:3270
or…
x3270 -model 3279-2 -efont 3270gt24 127.0.0.1:3270

Back to tk4- in VM/370 CE

I’ve been working on DOS/VS in VM/370 and now that, that works good I thought I’d return to MVS. I thought I this working on a dialed console. But I guess not. I even looked back at my log here. But it looks like I cut off the bottom of the MVS console (which would have shown it running in VM) to make it look like a normal console. Anywho I have to give Moshix credit for giving me (saw it in one of his videos) the key to make it work…

  • IPL 148 STOP on the logged on mvs. I was unaware of the STOP parameter.
  • Dial into MVS on another 3270 at 010
  • Resume the IPL with a “B”, on the logged on mvs
  • The IPL resumes on the dialed 3270 at address 010

I might have given him more credit but I tried a lot on my own because I couldn’t read half the things on his console/terminals because the font was too small.

The IPL in DOS/VS automatically stops to ask for the supervisor, so the STOP isn’t required. This allows you to dial in and resume the IPL.

Submit Jobs to DOS/VS by the Hercules socket reader

Submit local host (in my case…Linux) Jobs to DOS/VS directly by using the Hercules socket reader. I know this isn’t new or ground breaking to a lot of people. But I’m someone who’s emulation interest comes and goes. And lately I’ve been interested in running DOS/VS in VM/370 CE. Because DOS/VS as provided isn’t very friendly. So the first thing for me was to get back into REXX to recreate how I submitted Jobs from CMS to a DOS/VS guest. Computer staff used ICCF and CA-Vollie at the sites I worked at. I however preferred using VM/CMS.

Now that I’ve done that. I’d much prefer to doing most things local…storing programs and JCL. Using modern editors. The Hercules socket reader makes that easy. Easy when they provide you with a Perl script. Perl? Today? Really? Yes…it was already installed on my Linux distribution.

Started modifying PRIMCOB1 for DOS/VS

Well this is turning out harder than expected. I basically expected minor ENVIRONMENT and DATA DIVISION issues between MVS and DOS. Not data and logic issues. I mean IBM COBOL should basically be IBM COBOL. But Noooooooooooo!

I wanted to make a few small changes like accepting input from the console. And I wanted to right justify and replace spaces from the input with zeros using the INSPECT. But no such animal. Then I got a whole bunch of truncation warnings and any value > ~200…dumps. No problem I’ll use “ON SIZE ERROR” with some DISPLAYS on all the math statements to narrow down the problem. But the compiler doesn’t like that for some reason. Right justify is not working like I expected. I’m sure COBOL rust is playing a part. So, as of now you must enter leading zeroes. so 00200 for 200.

I’m getting “ILA5011I-W HIGH ORDER TRUNCATION MIGHT OCCUR.” on “ADD +2 TO I” and it is defined as “77 I PIC S9(8) COMP VALUE +1.”. Yeah it might occur if I do that ADD 2, ~50 million times. I mean anything is possible, but it seems a little over cautious to me.

It was fairly easy to port to gnuCOBOL. IBM COBOL to IBM COBOL should have been a piece of cake.

Scanner kinda works

I took a slight diversion from what I was doing, and saw this solution for another scanner…

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:sane-project/sane-release
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt install libsane-common

I did the last 2 and a popup said something like “HP 4500 added” after I plugged the scanner in. Xsane still failed but seemed to try. However Simple-scan (called Document scanner in the menu) scanned a image. It took a long time to start the output defaulted to PDF but output format can be changed.