On Tue, 5 Aug 2025 18:08:37 -0400, Phil Smith III <[email protected]> wrote:
>This is...interesting, but what is the goal? Or is it just an interest project? I would say that there are multiple hazy goals. One goal is to put some fundamental building blocks into the public domain. Almost all OSes - even free ones - are copyrighted. So for whatever reason people are reluctant to release the code to the public domain - I want to see what happens when you do release it to the public domain. I also wanted to see what the limits of C90 were - can you write portable code? Turns out that even the OS itself can be written portably (although you can quibble). And that portable nature means that it can operate in other environments - in this case, under MVS. Without even requiring privilege. Again, you can quibble. The main thing we are missing for a self-sustaining public domain ecosystem is a C90 compiler. I am using a fork of the copyrighted gcc 3.2.3 SubC is the closest contender. But perhaps now that there is a PCDOS-like system running under MVS, some bored sysprog will take the opportunity to write a C compiler that generates S/370 instructions and release it to the public domain. A lot of the things I do involve a theoretical person. Like a monk on a mountain with only access to a smartphone and a solar panel. And when he's bored he uses PdAndro or whatever to reconstruct the world of computers. Or create a closed-source commercial competitor to Windows or z/OS. There have indeed been people who pop up out of nowhere after I make software available. I don't know who or when until I enable a new environment and see what happens. I don't know if any bored sysprogs even exist. Or computer operators who have the skills required too. I myself was programming on the mainframe when I was still a tape jockey. I used to go to work on my days off to use the system. That was in 1986+ BFN. Paul. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
