Category Archives: IBM Mainframe Assembler

If you want to learn IBM mainframe assembly language but don’t have access to an IBM System/z machine, there is an excellent alternative:  Z390 Portable Mainframe Assembler and Emulator. (Even if you do have access, you can find it helpful.) This product has a long, successful history, is freely distributed, and runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac PC’s. It also supports all the instructions described in the Principles of Operation manual of October, 2019 – very impressive!

I asked Don Higgins, the creator, to write a short article about his product. Here it is.

Z390 Portable Mainframe Assembler and Emulator Overview

Don Higgins

November 20, 2020

Z390 is an open-source, Java-based mainframe assembler and emulator designed to run on Windows, Linux, and Mac PC’s.  The predecessor to z390 was the PC/370 shareware mainframe assembler and emulator for MS-DOS PC’s.  PC/370 was used by thousands of students at universities in the 1980s.  In 1993 I sold PC/370 to Micro Focus, and in 1995 I went to work for Micro Focus developing the assembler component of the Micro Focus Mainframe Express product for Windows PCs.  In 2004 I left Micro Focus and started the z390 open source project. 

The original goal of z390 was to assemble, link, and execute problem state application programs on any platform that supports Java runtime.  Over the years, the following major features have been added to z390:

1. Macro process and assembler compatible with HLASM
2. Linker to create executable modules 
3. Emulator with the following support:
   1. Problem state instruction execution
   1. Trace and dump options
   1. Floating-point, including HFP, BFP, and DFP.
   1. Storage management including GETMAIN and FREEMAIN
   1. QSAM, BDAM, and VSAM file management
   1. Sort merge utility
4. zCOBOL compiler which generates z390 assembler
5. zCICS transaction support developed by Melvyn Maltz
6. Graphical User Interface

In 2012, I retired from z390 development for a while.  Abe Kornelis and Melvyn Maltz continued to develop z390.  In 2020 I returned and have spent most of 2020 upgrading the z390 assembler to correctly assemble all the IBM mainframe instructions in the Principles of Operation manual published in Oct. 2019.  A test program named ZOPCHECK was developed to verify all 2357 opcode, mnemonic, and operand combinations.

 References:

1. Z390 Mainframe Assembler and Emulator Downloads
2. Z390 Portable Mainframe Assembler and zCOBOL and zCICS
3. Z390 Sort Utility
4. ZOPCHECK Opcode Verification Program
5. PC370 Assembler and Emulator History

Marist College sponsors one of my favorite mainframe conferences each year called the Enterprise Computing Conference. This year it is scheduled for June 7-9, and it is online and free. The conference always features some interesting general talks by leading IBM and industry experts, as well as a number of smaller talks on mainframe related topics. Here is your chance to attend for free. Check out the conference schedule here: https://ecc.marist.edu/web/conference2020/welcome

Be sure to register early so you won’t miss anything. I’m sorry I won’t get a chance to visit the lovely Marist campus on the Hudson river this year, but I’m looking forward to enjoying the conference virtually. See you there.

I have added a tab (Course Datasets) at the top of the blog to help provide input data for the programs referenced in the COBOL course.

In the case of input files that contain packed data, I am including a COBOL program that will produce the input file when you run it. Each COBOL program takes its own data from an in-stream dataset. I’m including the COBOL code and the JCL surrounding it to make things easier. You will have to adjust the file names.

In the case textual data files, I’m including a copy of the input data which you can paste into a member in a PDS to create the input file.

Let me know if I can help.

In the Video Course for IBM Assembler section, I’ve added an introductory lesson on Conditional Assembly and Macro Processing. If you haven’t written macros or want to learn something about conditional assembly instructions, this guide will get you started. There’s also a link to the Powerpoint that goes along with the video.

Cobol has been in the news lately since the NJ governor asked for help with some legacy systems.  Perhaps someone should tell him it’s worse than he thought – he’s going to need some assembler programmers, too. 🙂

Some of the recent discussion of Cobol by people who should know better is amusing if it weren’t also disappointing.  You would think that Cobol died in the 1970s.  The fact is, IBM’s Cobol compiler is quite sophisticated, as is the language.  This isn’t your father’s or mother’s Cobol. It is a truly modern language, even object-oriented if you want it to be. On the other hand, writing business systems in Java, C, Python, Ruby, etc.  represents a challenge I would not like to tackle (even though I love those languages).  In many ways those languages are ill-suited to the task – for example, just doing business arithmetic in Java requires some really ugly code.

But what do I know? I still think assembler is fun to write.

One thing’s for sure: It will be fun to hear the forensics of what happened with the governor’s legacy systems. I’m guessing it has little to do with any shortcomings in Cobol.