Please note I have no connection with lzlabs, other than I know some people who work there from other things I have dabbled in....
1) On that note its worth doing a LinkedIn search and seeing who say they work for LZLABS. I notice a couple I know from the Hercules that I didn't know worked there, plus Laurence Wilkinson who built an FPGA 360/30 clone, so folks how have been down the battle field with IBM and know a little bit about mainframes. 2) The approach isn't totally new or original. The original Don Higgins MS-DOS IBM 370 Assembler and Emulator took a similar approach, emulating the hardware for the problem state code and implementing the SVC's as shims in X86 code that call the MS-DOS APIs. This is still downloadable freeware. Then there was the MicroFocus Cobol which evolved from this. More recently Don wrote the Z390 Java emulator, which provides support for a number API's including parts of CICS and some access methods. This product continues to be available at www.z390.org. although Don no longer takes an active part in working on the project. In fact its a bit like SVC's in VM/370. The code which handles them is very different to that in the OS world, but the code still runs.... 3) I always thought the LE API's were, like most IBM mainframe backwards compatible. So if they changed in a way which would break code running on the LzLabs software defined mainframe, they would break the same code on a real mainframe. 4) Of course the challenge is to have an emulation which is both accurate and complete. Oh and of course is cheap enough to be cost effective. If we are talking legacy code, then LE is possibly irrelevant and its basic access methods such as QSAM and VSAM that would be critical. Also how do you provide RACF protection. What really is the scope of this project. Of course this sort of question probably won't get answered because the journalists don't know enough to ask it. I wonder if the current testing phase is also about defining the scope needed. Dave Wade ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
