An 18 Year Old Buys a Mainframe [video]

This is so cool. Especially given that this thing can run Linux.<p>I had a sorta-kinda similar experience in college years ago. My college (a small community college in the middle of nowhere) had received an IBM AS&#x2F;400 machine as a donation. I signed up for some &quot;Survey of Operating Systems&quot; class, and when I showed up the first day, the instructor (who already knew me) goes &quot;Phil, your job is to take the AS&#x2F;400, install an OS and get it on the Internet&quot;. Needless to say, at that point in time, I&#x27;d never seen or touched an AS&#x2F;400 before.<p>Anyway, the instructor pointed me to a room with an AS&#x2F;400, a huge stack of tapes (for the OS), a huge stack of manuals, and basically said &quot;just do it.&quot; It was an interesting experience, but in the end, I got the thing on the &#x27;net so you could telnet to it and work on it. And that indirectly led to the beginnings of my career in IT, as my first real IT job was as an AS&#x2F;400 operator &#x2F; Netware admin, and it was a job this instructor connected me with after this class.<p>So here&#x27;s to taking vintage IBM equipment and dorking around with it and putting it on the Internet!

There&#x27;s money to be made in the IBM midrange market. The company I work for is still using the iSeries (although we&#x27;re switching to TOP_5_CLOUD_ERP system as we speak), and we use Apache and PHP to connect to modern systems.<p>Every year, IBM is at the user conference for the software we currently use. They&#x27;re always showing off their newest Linux machine with 200 cores and I don&#x27;t know why, because half the people there aren&#x27;t even using bar coding, and everyone there is a small fry.<p>Here&#x27;s where a niche developer comes in. You can use Java which is supported by IBM, Zend has a nice PHP setup, and IBM&#x27;s bastardized version of Apache. Want to build an API to interact with this stone age fucker? You can do it. Build a Slack integration and look like a hero. Heck build some crappy web app because it&#x27;s easier and faster to do development with your favorite framework than it is to do it on the IBM with RPG and whatever the fuck that thing runs. SQL your brains out!<p>These customers aren&#x27;t leaving the IBM without investing a half a million dollars into a new platform. Every year, there are less and less people there, but they&#x27;ll gladly spend $50k to integrate some simple workflow.<p>Rent a booth for $1,000, give away an iPad or some FitBits and pass out some business cards. Go to 3-4 of these a year and you should be able to keep busy for a while. And you already know SQL, PHP, Apache, you just get to discover the &#x27;intricacies&#x27; of doing it on the IBM.

I believe I just found the Reddit entry he made when buying this machine. It has some great pics of him getting this monster in his basement.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;IBM&#x2F;comments&#x2F;3relk4&#x2F;i_just_bought_an_ibm_z890&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;IBM&#x2F;comments&#x2F;3relk4&#x2F;i_just_bought_a...</a>

I can totally relate to this. While not a mainframe, I had to move and reassemble and put in working order a film telecine recently. It&#x27;s a huge beast of a machine that consumes 5kW&#x27;s and weighs a ton or more and comes with several computers and consoles. Fun part was there&#x27;s no support for it. Company went dead a few years back. It was a ton of fun though, figuring all out from ye olde pdfs and hooking up a computer with putty to various RS-232 terminal outputs to see what&#x27;s going on. I got it in proper and working condition in the end and it works amazingly well and is now in production: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;Euv3vrr.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;Euv3vrr.jpg</a><p>I even got to learn about HIPPI while at it. I wish I had more adventures like that.

I am a mainframe developer. It&#x27;s sad that IBM isn&#x27;t more open about z&#x2F;OS and z&#x2F;VM to hobbyists. I think it really hurts the mainframe in the long run.

Seems like a very well grounded kid. He took his GED at 16 and started attending a community college using extra time he gained by going early to do career exploration. Very smart approach in my opinion.

I use old HP Proliant as a workstation. For $900 you get 24 cores and 256GB RAM. Its pretty loud and power inefficient, but works great for testing concurrent and memory intensive code.

&quot;IBM said the z890 will ship next month, with prices starting at $200,000.&quot; - 2004.<p>And he got it for 237$, good deal :)

I realize that the z series mainframes are better than those of old, but man, are Mom and Dad going to be pissed when they get their next power bill. A z890 is still going to need a 240VAC 30 amp power connection. Imagine running your dryer 24&#x2F;7. :-)

Very entertaining talk! Awesome project. Almost brought a tear to my eye when he showed the picture of the entrance to the basement being excavated by his father...a kind of stoic supportive parenting to aspire to!

Does buying one of these on eBay get you the right to run zOS ? If so that could be a lower cost alternative for people interested in learning about mainframes, since if you had the usage rights you could run zOS on Hercules and just store the actual hardware.

I love that someone offered to buy time on his machine.<p>Pro tip: when someone offers money for using something about which you don&#x27;t care, say &quot;Sure, how much do you think you need to get started?&quot;

I own a number of old(er) systems programming manuals, JCL books, and even a couple of COBOL handbooks from a few years ago when I was playing around with hercules [1]. I had a ton of fun (from a hacker perspective). I recommend playing around with it, if only to get a look at how different things can be.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hercules-390.eu&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hercules-390.eu&#x2F;</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bsp-gmbh.com&#x2F;turnkey&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bsp-gmbh.com&#x2F;turnkey&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;ve never heard of a computer running on three phase power before. That was unique.<p>My aged professors in college would joke about their interactions with mainframes. Some stories included making them vibrate at the right frequency such that they could move around. Apparently as a grad student one got in trouble for making them bump into each other. Kinda like having two Nokia phones vibrate in a &quot;battle&quot; against each other.

Fantastic talk. Great speaker. Thanks so much for posting this

How much processing power does IBM z890 have? What&#x27;s it comparable to today?

Is this part of a new movement where people move &quot;the cloud&quot; into their own homes?

I thought it was awesome that he stuck with it to get it booted and running. Would be really fun to run MVS&#x2F;TSO on it or VM&#x2F;370.

Owning my personal mainframe is a long-held dream of mine, but practically, it wouldn&#x27;t make a lot of sense unless somebody would let me put it into their datacenter.<p>My apartment is on the second floor, so a) I would not be able to get it upstairs and b) the floor would probably collapse under the weight. Plus, it is pretty big and would make my living room kind of ... crowded. And then, there is the electricity... And even if I somehow could solve all these problems, I would still need to attach a storage server to it, which kind of has the same problems.<p>So I envy this person, a lot, but realistically, I would not want to buy one for myself.<p>(IIRC, during the S&#x2F;390 days, IBM built a 4U mini-mainframe one could rack-mount. There also was the P&#x2F;390, which was a single-board implementation that came with one CPU, a channel controller and 128 or 256 MB RAM, all on a PCI card - I think it was meant for developers. Sadly, IBM has given up on small-ish mainframes...)

Anybody else try to ssh into it?<p><pre><code> $ ssh root@73.250.101.107 </code></pre> I thought maybe the port would be still open and using password authentication. :-)

Wow, I kind of assumed I was one of the only people under 30 interested in collecting old computers like this. Nice to know I&#x27;m not alone :).

There was an old Ars thread on this: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;civis&#x2F;viewtopic.php?f=8&amp;t=1114482&amp;start=0" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;civis&#x2F;viewtopic.php?f=8&amp;t=1114482&amp;sta...</a>

Laughed out loud when he introduced the power roadblock, and the pic of that connector.

How does this machine compare to a modern day consumer laptop (such as a Macbook Pro) in term of processing power?

This is very cool.<p>However I am wondering, what could it be used for nowadays?<p>I would do some benchmarking, I don&#x27;t know, e.g. LINPACK or maybe even distributed.net projects, BOINC ones, etc.<p>Other than that? Maybe you could do some 3D renderings? could you put it head to head with a GPU doing something embarrassingly parallel? probably not with anything like a Titan X, but maybe it could give a run for its money to something less powerful?<p>I am very intrigued by what you could achieve.

This reminds me of the computer collection one of the lecturers in my department owns (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.computermuseum.org.uk&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.computermuseum.org.uk&#x2F;</a>). They have quite a number of historical pieces finishing with a number of Crays, an IBM Blue Gene a few nuclear plant control units.

Love this kid. It&#x27;s great to see people discover their passions so early on and be able to dive fully into them. His experiences remind me a lot of Linus Torvalds and his book: &quot;Just for fun&quot;. That said, I&#x27;m also a tad jealous of him. I would have loved to grow up with a crazy lab to hack around with!

Putting the IP address of your mainframe online and allowing password logins (not to mention as root) not the greatest idea, if you wanted to clean up the audio you could probably count the number of symbols he enters as well.<p>Awesome project though and he presents well.

Big thanks to the poster, I looked on eBay and bought a early model Curta calculator for 50 euros, I thought that I would never own one, I hope it will arrive in good condition.

Kinda funny at the end... they zoom out and so much grey hair and bald heads :)

Man, I regret that I arrived one term too late to get a full System&#x2F;390 from my university. That thing would have been sweet in my dorm room.

I love read much about this

I submitted this exact same video 18 hours earlyer... WTF ?<p>&gt; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11372150" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11372150</a>