SHARE Association
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 9 months, 2018–2025
45:12 · 3.2M views · Mar 25, 2016
Connor Krukosky, an 18-year-old college student and vintage computer collector, tells how he bought an IBM z890 mainframe and got it running at home. The talk was given at SHARE in San Antonio in March 2016.
HN commenters cite it as an entertaining example of a teenager buying, hosting and booting a real mainframe.
9 comments from Hacker News
He did, his talk about it is really interesting: this video > He and his old computer friends played around with some applications that were on the platform, and even made an FTP server that put some data on the internet. Per [LINK]
I'm shure alot of you have seen this already. If not, it's an entertaining 45 minutes this video (Here's What Happens When an 18 Year Old Buys a Mainframe)
Consumer tech has been refined and dumbed down to the point where everything just sort of magically works, and since it's "magic" you never have to dive into the nuts and bolts. By making it so easy to use, we are depriving people of their opportunities to organically learn like people in my generation had to. Exceptions exist. * Here's What Happens When an 18 Year Old Buys a Mainframe - YouTube || this video
It depends on how full those drawers are. $250k to $1m would be the typical price range. It's easier and harder at the same time to buy older hardware. That's half the challenge though because the software is strictly licensed and you pay per MIPS. Here's a kid who bought a mainframe and then brought it up: this video
If you do, blog about it. One of the challenges in getting an old mainframe (System 360, 3090, etc) running is getting a license for the operating system from IBM. Hopefully acquiring one for the AS/400 is easier. this video