Re: Peter still in misery (was: Jan doesn't want Peter to know (was: Peter wants

Peter,

I would respectfully submit that there is more than just a 
possibility that your do-ers are wrong.

Most of the arguments against Hercules that have been stated here 
and the other boards (aside from certain persistent and blatant 
nonsense, of course) have referred to precedent.  In other words, 
they have referred to the past.  There are many historical examples 
of this sort of thing.  The Wright Brothers were told almost 
unanimously by the scientific- and engineering establishments of the 
early twentieth century that heavier than air flight is impossible, 
this despite the well-respected groundwork laid by Daniel Bernoulli 
in the eighteenth century.  That's only one example, of course, but 
there are thousands of them.  Why can't man fly?  Naturally, man 
can't fly because man has never flown.

The point is that just because something has never been done does 
not mean that it cannot- or will not be done.  Specifically, just 
because the clearly able and talented Fundamental Software analysts 
and coders had access to proprietary information above and beyond 
the z/Architecture Principles of Operation manual does not mean that 
without such materials that z/Architecture cannot be emulated.

Indeed, the POP is and has always been a programmer's reference and 
little more.  It is not a full architectural blueprint, logic 
diagram or anything else.  From this one can infer that one cannot 
use it to build a machine (or even an emulator) which will act 
precisely like the machine described by such a blueprint.  But does 
this matter?  Not necessarily.  To run an operating system, 
essentially a series of programs which interfaces with the microcode-
emulated instruction processing layer, one need only know that 
information which is included in the POP.  Internally, a real 
z/Series machine will have structures and processes which don't look 
anything like an emulator designed with the POP as the main 
reference.  But if the operating system will run, and run properly, 
that's all you need.  If FLEX-ES was designed with internal 
structures analogous with real structures in the layer just below 
that described in the POP, for example, it might hypothetically have 
many advantages, efficiency among them.  Assuming this is true 
(again, it's just a hypothetical but very plausible example), that's 
fine.  We want Hercules to be as good as it possibly can be (and in 
my humble opinion it's been in that ballpark for quite some time, 
now, being one of the finest software efforts I've ever had the 
pleasure to use), but it's certainly all right with me if a 
commercial product has more than just minor advantages.  Speaking 
for myself, and perhaps many of the other hobbyists on these lists, 
even if it's never improved beyond this point, Hercules is fine for 
me.  It will run OS/360 and MVS 3.8j, not to mention Linux/390 and 
most of the other license-free older operating systems, and that's 
really all I need.  The last time I worked at a shop running 3.8J 
was 1980, and my humble PC will assemble a program under the same OS 
and Hercules in one seventh of the elapsed time as it would on 
Johnson & Johnson's main corporate system in those days, a 370/168.  

I don't need to run licensed software, though I would certainly pay 
for a hobbyist license should IBM ever offer one, assuming it was in 
the ballpark of US$1,000 or less per annum.  Will they ever grant 
such a license en masse?  I cannot answer that question.  Note: I 
didn't say they will, and I didn't say they won't.  The question is 
not resolvable using the arguments, "they never have, so they never 
will" or "since they only have granted software licenses along with 
patent licenses, and the Hercules developers were not granted a 
patent license".  These are both precedent arguments.  Certainly, 
precedent arguments are better than no arguments and, in many 
venues, such as common law, are taken very seriously.  But even such 
legal systems allow for precedent to be broken, and IBM is far from 
a rigorous legal system or anything like it.  IBM is capable of 
changing its corporate mind and has done countless times in the 
past, just as Sam Knutson so recently pointed out.

I'm not saying that IBM will change their policy on this issue; far 
from it.  I'm only saying that none of us can say that they will not.

Regards,
Bomber

--- In [email protected], "Peter D. Ward" <pdw@m...> wrote:

<snip>

Quoting J.J.:

>> John Erhman stated in a conversation about the 64 bit
>> architecture in november 2000 that the zPOP would describe "all
>> elements of the 64 bit architecture".  John has been 100%
>> correct, I have not found anything so far that would indicate
>> otherwise,  nor do I believe that anyone else has.

> Now that our 64-bit architecture implementation is out the door,
> I asked the do-ers about this, and their answer is they don't
> agree.


------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Get 128 Bit SSL Encryption!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/JjlUgA/vN2EAA/kG8FAA/dpFolB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->

To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
hercules-advocacy-unsubscribe-hHKSG33TihhbjbujkaE4pw@public.gmane.org

 

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/