Gregg Levine wrote:
Back when Hercules was still growing up and the original list was not
as big as it is now, I made an interesting suggestion; Basically we
could find out if the list server software from LSoft was still
available from VM, we could track down a copy and get to run on
Hercules running VM/370 Release 6.
I approached Lsoft about this some years ago. As far as I recall, the
response back then was fairly positive but there were a number of snags.
Firstly, Listserv for VM was archived on old tapes and no working drive
was available to read them. Secondly, it is not going to run on VM/370 R6
without a lot of work. It's about 30 years since I last saw Listserv on
VM but as far as I recall, it is mostly written in REXX. I suspect it
makes a lot of use of EXECIO which I don't think we have at present.
There are other smaller issues but I think this one is the showstopper at
the moment.
Naturally this was before I found out that two things did happen, one
of them was that LSoft made the bad decision to get out of the list
server on the appropriate IBM mainframe that we would be emulating for
VM/370 Release 6. The second was that of how such a mainframe would
find itself connected to the Internet. And naturally running that
release. It's possible that IBM did create a preliminary stack for
networking via TCP/IP protocols but, sadly a lot of the software we
would need is not available.
The good news is that having TCP/IP connectivity on VM/370 R6 is not a
requirement to run Listserv. On VM, Listserv exchanged mail in the form
of spool files with a mail transfer agent (such as Lsoft Lmail or the
Crosswell Mailer) on the same VM system or with an off-system MTA by
sending the spool files over NJE links to other systems. The latter is
possible now on VM/370 R6 so mail can be transferred to an external system
which has TCP/IP connectivity where it can be gatewayed into the SMTP world.
I have an NJE link set up to my VMS system (running HUJI-NJE) which can get
mail to and from the outside by routing it through the PMDF MTA on VMS.
This is a bit fragile yet and there are issues with preventing spam etc but
it seems to work most of the time.
None of this is is likely to turn into a viable replacement for Yahoo
groups before they go away (although Listserv can host files in general as
well as mailing lists) but it is fun to play with.
Regards,
Peter Coghlan.
