Thats cool, your lucky with the z800, most of the other mainframes have "exotic" (aka 3 phase 277/480) power requirements. We had to pull power in our existing

Thats cool, your lucky with the z800, most of the other mainframes have "exotic" (aka 3 phase 277/480) power requirements. We had to pull power in our existing computer lab to run our MF. So, while its possible to order most mainframe equipment for single phase 208, it doesn't appear to be the default choice for the kinds of places that buy mainframes. I settled for hercules at home, hell of a lot easier to manage, and is pretty fast given that its a fairly naive emulator (aka no JIT/tracing/etc). I think if the turbo hercules guys (or someone else) added a decent JIT, and solved the licensing problem IBM would be in a world of hurt. Although, maybe not, the few remaining customers aren't the kind to run their bank/airline/etc on a 10k piece of hardware and an open source emulator. Of course, I've been wondering for a few years what percentage of machines are being sold to development shops to support the limited number of real customers. That is why we purchased ours, to support real customers, not to run any actual work on it. Of course I've also heard that most of the business class machines are sold with tiny capacities, because they are simply hot fail-over targets. The assumption is that if something goes wrong at the primary site, someone calls up IBM and gets them to boost the capacity on the idle machine as the workload is shifting over.