Man, what a great week - and what a fun weekend!

#mainframe-week was great! I'll have to redo my Markdown notes as HTML and put them on my website, with pics, and share links here and on the other site.

• I watched cool history videos
• I got MVS-TK4- (not a typo) running
• I learned to navigate ISPF, create data sets, and write code. This, to me, was the highlight - not just getting the emulator up and running, but actually using it. Actually getting to see a little of what mainframes were really like in their heyday.
• I... almost, compiled and ran JCL. Almost. But apparently, the terminal emulator I was using decided it didn't like me using CapsLock and adding "non-printable control characters" into my code, so it was like... yeah, my left Shift key is already being a flake, I'm not gonna go thru this again only to find it didn't like Backspace, or Home/End or whatever. But it was still kinda cool to see what the compiler of the day looked like - a language that was originally done on punch cards. And it made more sense than I thought it would. Funny, some of our modern systems are weirder.
• I worked on every remotely-mainframe-ish project I've had sitting around. The project I called "Mobile Mainframe" a few years ago? Yeah that's getting a huge upgrade. And I've had so much fun just creating stuff designed to look like those old screens (sorry, "panels" ) and SSH'ing into my Pi to use them in cool-retro-term.

Most of it... well because I don't speak Config, it was painful. Settings and me are like water and oil. And of course I kinda had to lean on AI just to figure out how to use the text editor. But I have to give a very special shout-out to @Greg_Gauthier - dude, without your videos, I never would have gotten past the Hercules admin console. Actually, without your hard work, I wouldn't have even known MVS-TK5 was a thing. Mainframe Week just wouldn't have been as fun if i couldn't poke around an actual mainframe OS. So thanks.

And on Friday, I saw a super-cool video about how to create what I'm calling a Linux DOStro. 😆 The guy used Alpine Linux to auto-run FreeDOS in QEMU. I tried, in 3 different VMs, to make that work... but ultimately what got it done for me was Debian and DOSBox. I do wish the guy did more of a tutorial than just a demo, cuz Alpine is one of those "built for the maintainer" type distros, a cranky quirkmonger that apparently is made for embedded systems so ridiculously limited they can't even run on a flippin' Pi Zero. Of course I'm sure some of it has to do with VirtualBox, but QEMU is a colossal pain, another cryptic "you are Linus himself or else good flippin' luck puny human" Slopski McMess of a tool. Let's face it, unless you have a deep, intimate knowledge of all Linux internals - to such an extreme that it's either an obsession or some kind of twisted substitute for a human relationship - yeah, ya better have an IQ in the quintillions or have a direct line to Mr. Torvalds. A simple programmer with a Master's and 12 years experience is not enough. These tools were clearly intended exclusively for the people who created them. Which I guess is a good thing from a code of conduct standpoint - can't ban anyone in a team of 1. 🤣

But thankfully, AI is a fountain of knowledge (albeit much of it outdated), on all things 0xA98D1E00 0x94832176 booga-booga. Without AI, I would never have actually ended up with the little proof-of-concept VM I have (well I might've gotten there eventually, some day, many many MANY weekends from now, and then I'd be playing find-and-depuzzle-the-config-files for another several years). Even with AI, it was an intense 4 rounds of trial and error and guesswork and why the puck is it doing THAT and how about switching AIs and cool we're getting somewhere and okay let's start over and why the puck am I doing this? 🤣 lol seriously, taking a bare bones Linux and getting it to run even a simple graphical app is essentially building a functional time machine. Rocket. Fraggin'. Surgery. And we wonder why our systems have so many vulnerabilities... cuz no one can understand the whole picture. Yes, long-gone are the days when a single geek get his or her head around an entire system.

But the cool thing is, I DID eventually crack it. It only took me 4 or 5 VMs (depending on if you count the one that worked). And to see it boot up, print the usual Linux boot-screen nonsense, and then go straight into DOS... oh man was that cool! And this little Debian + X11 + DOSBox combo should be super-usable on that laptop - it has 4 gigs of RAM and plenty of storage, despite barely running Windows 10. So next weekend, Lord willing, it's time to run it on real hardware. 😎

And the potential for this idea - setting aside QEMU and DOS for a minute, just this general idea of "boot Linux and end up in a full-screen graphical app" has such tremendous potential for us retro fans. I was seriously considering going Commodore with this, or maybe rolling my own 8-bit "fantasy computer". Shoot, even if I kept it Linux-y and just had it run cool-retro-term - I'd kinda love that. And I mean shoot, in theory it would be possible to turn some of these retro-laptop-setups into scripts, so all you have to do is wget some-url, double-check what you're about to run, and run it! Maybe when this is over, I'll get an AI to do that for me. Now that the heavy-duty-aggravation part is over, depuzzling cryptic config files in some arcane Unix-y-something language hidden in obscure and seemingly random locations, and wondering what the puck... well now that all that mess is behind me, I'm really looking forward to seeing what this new setup can do!

And all that's to say nothing of the not-nerdy fun I had this weekend. 😆

But for now, the weekend is over, and I have to work tomorrow. So it's time for me to make like VM #1 and crash. Goodnight, ladies and geeks!