Obviously, we don't expect you to have your own mainframe to login to, so you'll be logging into one of ours using Skytap. Skytap is a cloud platform for creating, managing, and sharing virtual machine environments. It supports most combinations of operating systems and browsers. As long as you're using something that's fairly up-to-date, you should be all right. Basically, if it supports HTML5, you're good to go. The course kit that you got, has all the information you need specific to this course. Instead of having you install software, we're giving you access to a virtual machine through Skytap with all the software you need already on it. All you have to do is click on the button for this course and it will get you started, so click on that button. This will connect you to your environment. Under it, you'll see a system. The first time you come across it, it'll probably say, "Powered off," and well, that's no fun, so let's power it on. Click on that Play button. You may get a message about the operation being rate-limited, simply meaning we don't want you to run this too often. It might take a minute and then go into the busy state and then go into running. Click on the system and it will bring up a full screen virtual desktop. You'll see a desktop with a number of icons including CMC1, CMC2, MVS1, VM2, and PuTTY. The yellowish icons are a shortcut for a program called Personal Communications, usually shortened to p com. This is a communication suite that lets you connect to a variety of systems including the 3270, which is the primary mainframe console. The ZVM instance we want is VM2, so double-click on the VM2 icon in the bottom left corner there. Now, a thing about keyboards and emulators. If you're on a non full-size keyboard which doesn't have both Control keys or something else missing that might come in handy later on, you'll want to take a trip to the keyboard settings and that's in Edit, Preferences, Keyboard. For starters, we're going to set up the Enter key to perform a typical Enter key function. If you don't do this, Enter is just a carriage return and my Mac doesn't have a right Control key, so I need to do this, so I can actually hit Enter. Go into Customize and see what the setting for right Control is. You can see it's an enter/ctrl in brackets. Copy or just remember that and then click on the Enter key. You can see where the default is right here, it's just a new line. Type or paste in what we got from the right control key. As you become more advanced, you may find you want easier access to certain other keys that are normally only on a full-size keyboard, and this is where you'll make all that happen. Lastly, if you're on a computer with no function keys, you'll probably also want to remap your number keys to act as function keys by doing a similar operation or find out if there's a keyboard modifier you can use for them. When you're done, close the window and you'll get two prompts asking if you want to save those changes. Hit "Yes" to both, and then save that new keyboard setting to something you'll remember. I named mine Enter because I changed the Enter key. Next change the current keyboard from IBM default to user-defined, select your keyboard which you just created and hit "Okay" then go up to file and hit "Save" to make those changes stick. Now we're ready to get started. The first thing we have to do is connect to the correct system. We get there by issuing a dial command, which can be shortened just to d followed by the system name. In my case it's mvsh64, but check the note you were sent for your login information. Hit "Enter" and look, Enter works now. We get this prompt and what we want to do here is type tso for time-sharing option followed by Enter. Now we're ready to log on. I've got my username and my password. Here we go. Now we're at ISPF and we're ready to start the hands-on labs.
