Mind blown. You can run IBM #zos on a PC with a personal edition license.
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zdt/14.2.x?topic=personal-edition
And it has IBM #COBOL inside it. I don't understand why this was so hard for me to find. Looks like I need a new machine (linux host, 1tb drive space and then enough oomph to run a VM)
My possibly ill-informed opinion on the mainframe developer market
#zOS work has so many barriers
- Can't run it locally. Only 1 training program at IBM for terminal access. (wrong! prersonal edition exists)
- The only mainframe code you can run locally is MVS from the early 1980s
- GNUCobol is probably not like modern IBM Cobol
- Microfocus appears to be in financial crisis and you can't even get a trial license compiler, let alone a personal license compiler
1/2
- Rexx has like no internet presence (compared to popular languages)
- Stories about people getting a job in the US doing mainframe work and then 2 years later the whole firm is outsourced to juniors in India (i.e. this is treated as a cost center with a value of skills & experience at $0)
2/3
- Job postings want extensive experience with IBM stack even though most stories I hear about people doing mainframe now didn't spend their days from College to Now doing mainframe, they were doing PC stack work. People who started doing mainframe right out of college... that generation of people is mostly dead, but the job ads are still trying to recruit them.