From the comments on the previous story:
Connor Krukosky is an 18-year-old college student with a hobby of collecting vintage computers. One day, he decided to buy his own mainframe… An IBM z890. This is his story.
Grab a warm drink, and enjoy. This is great.
I had a fairly similar experience at 22 when I bought a ‘lot’ of decommissioned Sun Fire 240 servers while I was still in college.
I easily learned more about networking from using those old servers than I ever did from my networking classes.
I believe it is appropriate to thank Thom for promoting my modest comment into an article of its own.
At some point I started to become really curious into mainframe technology and di into what makes them special. I even skimmed through the z/OS manuals which is really fun read for someone interested in the mainframe technology as IBM has presented the whole ideology that goes into building these machines and how the incredible throughput and reliability is achieved
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg246366.html?Open
I also added reply to my original comment that will include the tear down videos which reveal some really crazy technology and go as deep as one can go into those systems.
I have a little dream that maybe one day I have an opportunity to work on the mainframe technology which to me is like a holy grail of computing. This year I managed to tick another dream of mine which is the exact opposite – embedded controllers for automotive industry. The engineer in me is quite curious and I am eager to explore the IT in its entirety.
Anyway thanks again for Thom and hopefully you will find the material as interesting and inspiring as I did. After all, if you look too many mainframe videos in youtube, then even more is offered.
I used to buy 10 year old IBM xSeries servers on eBay to practice with Windows Server 2000 and 2003 when I was studying for the MCSA certification back in the 2000s. I’ve learned a lot just trying and breaking stuff.
I miss them, as I had to sell them because they took too much space and were too noisy.
I recall an article about a “kid” who did just this, and the story was mostly about getting the mainframe shoved in to the fellows basement (plus laments on power and heat…).
I don’t recall the article, I have yet to watch the video, so I can’t say if this is a story about the same guy.
I will say I wish I could have spent, oh, 5 years of my career on an AS/400, or maybe another IBM mainframe,
Apple said “Think Different”, well the IBM world IS different. Though I’m grateful for the few years at school spent on the ancient CDC stuff. That was some of the most enlightening computing I’d ever encountered.
If you want you can actually run a main frame in your house.
DO a search for Hercules and set it up. Some places are using this software as a migration path towards more modern infrastructure and thinking.
However, some places it will never die. It will contiue to run until someone makes a decision to reinvent the wheel in a newer expression of modern computing.
But for some places it makes no sense to modernize.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ks2YPiP0tys
Well, most places modernized by virtualization. Old company’s inventory was on a HP UX box from early 80s. The modern replacement was quoted at 2-3 million USD. We just virtualized the whole thing for a fraction of the cost.
Damn inventory app had its own turring complete programming/scripting language for configuration of products. Yeah, new product launches that included learning enough of the language to add it and the hundreds of comprising parts to the system was “fun”.
One thing to note though is the security in the context of Mainframes. The zOS is not really built with security in mind nor meant to be exposed to malicious user activity. Telnet is a norm and (Open)SSH is rarely used. You can find many videos like this in Youtube where BlackHat and DefCon guys have a lots of fun with mainframes. What is a norm in PC world is considered overly complicated in that side of computing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL65zWrofvk
Edited 2017-12-12 07:43 UTC
I remember reading this last year, maybe it wasn’t osnews though.
Was waiting for him to play Doom on it.