10 Aug
2015
10 Aug
'15
2:13 p.m.
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of John
Wilson
Sent: 10 August 2015 22:05
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Subject: Re: MTS
On Mon, Aug 10, 2015 at 01:24:41PM -0700, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:
old
I think there might be enough there to IPL and
perform a basic
installation, but what immediately caught my attention was the mention
that sites had to purchase ASMH from IBM, which leads me to believe the
public distributions don't contain an assembler.
I assume you're saying that the real MTS sites bought *ASMH back in the days, not that it's possible for mere mortals to
buy a license for home
emulator use nowadays at a finite price?
That is correct, they bought Assembler H. There are Assembler H compatible
alternatives such as:-
http://tachyonsoft.com/
and even
http://z390.org/
but neither of these have the MTS extensions, and the MTS folks say these
are needed to re-configure MTS
I'd love to be wrong (and I'd gladly pay four digits, as long as it's
one-time and
not per-year). It'd be hard to get very far w/o
*ASMH (it's horrible but
it's
the standard, and MTS had plenty of languages I miss
less), and writing a
clean/legal reimplementaation now would only take, say, 5000 person-years.
As I say there are at least two clean replacements, but they don't have the
MTS extras. However as Hercules allows you to change the config then the
major need for MTS Assembler H has gone away. Some folks have also worked
out how to patch some of the MTS tables to change the I/o so again reducing
the need.
All this has meen discussed in the H390-MTS group so its worth joining and
reading the info there..
John Wilson
USERHA8G at RPITSMTS.Bitnet
Dave Wade
G4UGM
(once upon a time PM27 on the Newcastle Upon Tyne MTS system)