This is why TurboHercules is positioning itself as a provider of 圆4 and Itanium platforms suitable as emergency backup boxes for modern mainframes.
Very old IBM mainframe operating systems that are in the public domain - including OS/360, DOS/360, DOS/VS, MVS, VM/370, and TSS/370 - can be legally deployed on top of the Hercules emulator.īut all the modern mainframe platforms - z/OS, z/VSE, and z/VM - have license restrictions that do not allow for customers who have versions of the code running on real mainframes to load that software atop Hercules - except for one provision in the IBM software license agreement, according to Miller, that allows for mainframe shops to load their software onto another machine in the event that the box on which it is licensed fails. Hercules currently runs on 32-bit x86, 64-bit 圆4, and Itanium processors, and it can itself be deployed on top of Windows, Linux, Mac OS, or Solaris running on those three hardware options.
The Hercules emulator can emulate the System/360, the System/370, the ESA/390, and the z architectures. It is distributed under the Q Public License, developed by application development tool maker Trolltech for its Qt tools and since abandoned for the GNU General Public License. The emulator is written in C with a smattering of assembly code where performance is crucial, and actually allows code, operating systems, and other systems software written for many generations of IBM mainframe hardware to run atop other servers. TurboHercules is co-headquartered in Paris, France, where Bowler moved after he left the United Kingdom, and in Seattle, Washington, in close proximity to the one big software company that has in the past taken a shining to anything that gave Big Blue some grief, particularly with mainframes. So, if you are reading this, Cravath, Swaine, and Moore, IBM's New York lawyers, this is not about replacing existing mainframes, but about giving their software a place to run when the mainframe crashes. Rather than go straight at the IBM mainframe base, which many a company has tried to do and ended up in court, TurboHercules is taking an oblique angle of attack on the mainframe base, positioning a commercialized version of the Hercules mainframe emulator as a platform for disaster recovery machine for working mainframes and their software stacks. Roger Bowler - the creator of the open source Hercules mainframe emulator - has put together a company called TurboHercules to try to commercialize the decade-old program that he created as a "programmer's plaything."
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