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An 18 Year Old Buys a Mainframe [video]
- ChuckMcM 11y agoI thought it was awesome that he stuck with it to get it booted and running. Would be really fun to run MVS/TSO on it or VM/370.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- noir_lord 11y agoPutting 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. Awesome project though and he presents well.
- gricardo99 11y agoHe actually talks about that in the Q&A at the end of the presentation. Funniest line: "China has been trying to login". Very impressive kid.
- noir_lord 11y agoAh missed that bit.
- coleca 11y agoLoved that he offered to give out the root password to anyone that wanted to experiment on it. He said something like "burn it down, I have backups". This kid is going to go far with that kind of passion and attitude. He's a true honest to goodness hacker. I love it.
- dsmithatx 11y agoI 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. https://www.reddit.com/r/IBM/comments/3relk4/i_just_bought_an_ibm_z890/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IBM/comments/3relk4/i_just_bought_a...
- saganus 11y agoThat's some serious job right there, just dismantling the thing and putting it back together. I hate it when I assembled computers and I ended up needing extra screws... or worse, I ended up with "spare" screws which left me wondering what exactly I missed. Can't imagine doing it to something this big. Or like when you buy something that comes packed neatly..and as soon as you unpack it it becomes impossible to put it back and make it fit as before. Maybe I'm the problem... uhmmm..
- mindcrime 11y agoI hate it when I assembled computers and I ended up needing extra screws... or worse, I ended up with "spare" screws which left me wondering what exactly I missed. Nah, that's just Rap's Law of Inanimate Reproduction in action! http://www.anvari.org/fortune/Laws/1348_raps-law-of-inanimate-reproduction-if-you-take-something-apart-and-put-it-back-together-enough-times-eventually-you-will-have-two-of-them.html http://www.anvari.org/fortune/Laws/1348_raps-law-of-inanimat...
- saganus 11y agoHaha! That's one very wise law. Never heard of that before. I wish 100 Dollar bills had screws...
- ars 11y agoI started running a video camera when I do stuff like that. Then you can go back and see what you missed.
- saganus 11y agoThat's a neat idea. Never thought of that before. At most I laid down a white sheet of paper and put the screws in sort of the same shape as I picked them up from, so I knew these two long ones were at the top, the short ones at the bottom, etc. But still... one accidental hit to the table and boom..everything is messed up.
- mindcrime 11y agoThis is so cool. Especially given that this thing can run Linux. 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/400 machine as a donation. I signed up for some "Survey of Operating Systems" class, and when I showed up the first day, the instructor (who already knew me) goes "Phil, your job is to take the AS/400, install an OS and get it on the Internet". Needless to say, at that point in time, I'd never seen or touched an AS/400 before. Anyway, the instructor pointed me to a room with an AS/400, a huge stack of tapes (for the OS), a huge stack of manuals, and basically said "just do it." It was an interesting experience, but in the end, I got the thing on the '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/400 operator / Netware admin, and it was a job this instructor connected me with after this class. So here's to taking vintage IBM equipment and dorking around with it and putting it on the Internet!
- larrik 11y agoI've installed OS's on plenty of AS/400's for a prior job. When everything goes perfect, they are still a complete nightmare. I can't imagine how you pulled it off, frankly.
- mindcrime 11y agoLet's just say it took me a while, and a lot of trial and error.
- sixothree 11y agoAs someone who collects vintage computers my suggestion is to document the process. Having to re-discover an obscure command is just painful.
- apecat 11y agoPlease feel free to share some of these nightmares. These systems are so surrounded by an air of mystique and vague hints of danger, and I've mainly tried to read up on the supposed benefits of using mainframes to get why anybody would use them. I'm honestly interested in all kinds of IT horror stories, I need a reminder every now and then to keep the IT part of free from things that break and require tinkering (starting with unnecessary on-premise servers in small biz settings). Mainframes are obviously nine orders of magnitude beyond what I ever to, but still: the lessons of expensive and proprietary can be somewhat universal.
- znpy 11y agoI submitted this exact same video 18 hours earlyer... WTF ? > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11372150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11372150
- dang 11y agoBy coincidence, I just replied to you there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11377284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11377284. It's largely random which submission of a story gets traction on HN. We plan to make the dupe detector more sophisticated. One of our goals is to privilege the first submitter more often, because we hope that will incentivize people to submit more unique things, which should benefit the community. In the meantime, though, it's a lottery in any one instance—but it does even out in the long run, the more good stories you submit.
- znpy 11y agoI am getting downvoted a lot and I really don't see why. I didn't mean to be offensive towards the user that posted this entry, but just highlight this "issue". My main "wtf" is due to the fact that in the past I submitted links that were already in the system and I got redirected to the comments page, as usual. Considering this is the exact case and there are eighteen hours between submission, i guessed this is a noticeable glitch. So please, stop dowinvoting me.
- Johnny555 11y agoYou're probably getting downvoted since your comment isn't relevant to this post. Yes, it's probably a glitch in the HN dupe detector, but people didn't click through to this article to read about that.
- ChrisDutrow 11y agoI believe that comment is being down voted because of its feel and tone. It's a quick one-line complaint with a negative "low-class" abbreviation at the end. It's a little disrespectful to both the ycombinator (who's system is being criticized) and to the person who submitted the video with better luck than you had. People who read a comment like this are more likely to feel emotions of annoyance, mild anger, and contempt. These things happen sometimes, you say something and it gets interpreted in a way you didn't intend. I wouldn't worry about it too much. Probably a better version of this comment would be something like: "I actually submitted this 18 hours before this one went up. It's funny how sometimes they catch and sometimes they don't. Super interesting video though, glad it's being appreciated!"
- tdeck 11y agoWow, I kind of assumed I was one of the only people under 30 interested in collecting old computers like this. Nice to know I'm not alone :).
- PeCaN 11y agoThere are dozens of us! You can get old SPARC servers super cheap on eBay too. I'm super tempted to get one. I was also trying to find an Itanium the other day but those are darn impossible to get. :(
- cubano 11y agoI've been dreaming about getting one of those old Sun workstations with monochrome bitmapped display that used to be the thing when I was an undergrad CS student in 1984. I remember being so impressed at the size of the monitor and the crispness of the display...and plus the fact that the workstations only seemed to be in offices that had "clout."
- jerrysievert 11y agothere was a hardware surplus store in portland that carried off-brand sparcs at a very good price ($5-10) in the early 2000's. i still kind of regret not buying one. though i got rid of my e4500 a while ago, and was glad to see that one go.
- bane 11y agoThere's even a whole subreddit about it /r/retrocomputing I think.
- jamstruth 11y agoI'm interested in collecting old machines, mainly older British machines like the ZXSpectrum and BBC Micro. I have nowhere near the space required though. Then there's also the question of what would I actually do with them all? Especially if I got into collecting old mainframes
- mikestew 11y agoI 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 24/7. :-)
- LeifCarrotson 11y ago...but instead of a dryer, it's a z890! Totally worth it!
- mikestew 11y agoTruuuuue, but my clothes are still wet. Combine the two, though, and it'll dry clothes faster than you can put them in.* *An incredibly lame joke playing off the I/O throughput of mainframes, and...oh, never mind.
- DigitalJack 11y agoIn the video he says it's been negligible so far.
- mikestew 11y agoThanks. At work, can't (well, more "out of courtesy to the client that pays me by the hour, won't") watch the video. I'm not terribly familiar with the Z architecture, but I guess if you're not working the thing real hard maybe it doesn't use much power. On the ancient hardware I grew up on, just spinning the drives would probably double your residential power bill.
- mrcsparker 11y agoFantastic talk. Great speaker. Thanks so much for posting this
- viraptor 11y agoGreat speaker, but he needs to learn not to do the powerpoint karaoke. The audience sees the slides, we see the slides, no reason to read them verbatim.
- haswell 11y agoThe kid is 18. He's doing pretty well in the presentation department all things considered. I'm sure he'll learn about principles of effective presentation i.e. "don't read the slides" in due time. :P
- zelos 11y agoExactly. 18, already capable of producing a witty, intelligent presentation like that and he can assemble a mainframe? He's going to go far.
- Hansi 11y agoBut it makes it viable to audio only listeners (be it watching in background or blind).
- viraptor 11y agoI'm not saying he should leave those things on the slides and not say them - that would be silly, it's good content. I'm saying that the slides don't have to have the same text. Give either summaries or extra info on them. Pictures are cool too. Just don't stop what you're talking about to look at the screen and read what's written there. The disability argument doesn't really apply here - what about deaf users, why say anything that's not on the slides? Because that's what the transcript is for. Usability is orthogonal to what I'm saying.
- yuhong 11y agoThere was an old Ars thread on this: http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1114482&start=0 http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1114482&sta...
- proee 11y agoHow does this machine compare to a modern day consumer laptop (such as a Macbook Pro) in term of processing power?
- azeirah 11y agoSomeone asks "how much RAM does it have", 8GB. So that's equal to a modern day laptop. In terms of pure processing power though, still no idea
- vbezhenar 11y agoAFAIK it has high I/O efficiency and very high memory bandwidth, so for some tasks it might perform very well. If you are comparing single-core performance, probably much worse.
- saganus 11y agoThis is very cool. However I am wondering, what could it be used for nowadays? I would do some benchmarking, I don't know, e.g. LINPACK or maybe even distributed.net projects, BOINC ones, etc. 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? I am very intrigued by what you could achieve.
- kjs3 11y agoYou could run a number of real IBM OSes on it and learn mainframes. There's still a huge market for mainframes. You could run a couple of hundred or thousand Linux VMs for fun. It's an IBM mainframe...it's not about how fast the CPU is, it's about how fast the whole system is (cpu, memory, i/o).
- saganus 11y agoWould it be feasible to say, install Kubernetes? I've read that a lot of what made zSeries "special" was that they had special purpose chips for a lot of things, from I/O to encryption and other stuff (not really well versed in the area so please correct me if I'm wrong). Not sure how many of those special features you can use if you use Linux instead of z/OS, but could it be in principle something tractable or not even close?=
- kjs3 11y agoI suppose you can load whatever Linux thingy you want that has a port (I've never tried Kubernetes). That said, the thing that makes machines like this "special" is the aggregate throughput and availability you can get out of them (the dedicated processors are part of that). To really unlock that, you do want to run z/OS and it's tools, and then run things like Linux on top of that. It's more complicated than "this is just another kind of Linux box".
- fencepost 11y agoElectric heat. These days it's a somewhat inefficienct electric heater that also can do some computing tasks.
- DigitalJack 11y agoSeems 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.
- tgflynn 11y agoDoes 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.
- yuhong 11y agoNo.
- tgflynn 11y agoIn that case I'm not sure I see the point in buying something like this just to run Linux. Linux looks pretty much the same no matter what it's running on.
- icelancer 11y agoTo preserve history and collect it.
- tgflynn 11y agoSure I get that but if you can't run the software that was/is most frequently used on these machines then you're only preserving half the history.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- srcmap 11y agoTo learn and keep the basement nice and warm (all 6kw of them) . :-)
- emersonrsantos 11y agoFrom hercules-390 FAQ (which I was a developer long ago). OS/390, z/OS, and other ESA or z/Architecture operating systems are definitely licensed to a particular machine. Therefore, in practice you cannot run any classic ESA or z/Architecture operating system on your PC unless you can obtain a license from IBM allowing you to do so. It is believed that there are, however, four ways you could run z/OS, z/VM, z/VSE, OS/390, VM/ESA, or VSE/ESA under Hercules using currently available licenses: 1. Running under Linux on the Pentium processor of a P/390 which is licensed to run the OS. 2. Running under Linux/390 on a mainframe which is licensed to run the OS. 3. Running under the terms of a disaster recovery provision of the OS license (but I really don't recommend depending on Hercules to be your disaster recovery solution!). 4. Using the IBM OS/390 or z/OS DemoPkg, which is available only to IBM employees and IBM Business Partners
- js8 11y agoI am a mainframe developer. It's sad that IBM isn't more open about z/OS and z/VM to hobbyists. I think it really hurts the mainframe in the long run.
- noobermin 11y agoIs it a cultural thing? Is there a reason for this?
- Spooky23 11y agoIt's a legacy of the era when IBM ruled the roost. All of the mainframe vendors were like that. There was an office space in the middle of our data center at my first big IT job. Only Unisys people were allowed to enter, and crossing the threshold into that room, or opening a Unisys cabinet was a serious offense. I'd be secretive too! That "mainframe" was a $25,000 Xeon server with a mainframe emulator running on it. They had these sweet contracts where they would lease the server based on performance -- MIPS/mo. The IBM mainframes are big power boxes with custom asics for i/o and lots of mumbo jumbo to make it sound magical.
- dfox 11y agoI still think that in IBM's case this depends on what you mean by mainframe. Midrange systems (ie. AS/400) are power boxes and today even sold as such (IBM will sell you the hardware as "IBM Power system" with choice of AIX, OS/400 or Linux as OS). On the other hand I'm almost certain that System z CPUs are microcoded monstrosities that run z/Architecture machine code pretty much natively.
- CountHackulus 11y agoI've worked on the compilers for Z systems and on the z/PDT emulator that someone else mentioned. The processors they run are indeed monsters. The instruction set is especially interesting as you can see the transition from 24-31-64 bit. Messing around with the SAM (set address mode) instructions was always fun. They also have some interesting interruptable instructions that can move or compare up to 2GB of memory.
- Keyframe 11y agoI 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's a huge beast of a machine that consumes 5kW's and weighs a ton or more and comes with several computers and consoles. Fun part was there'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's going on. I got it in proper and working condition in the end and it works amazingly well and is now in production: http://i.imgur.com/Euv3vrr.jpg http://i.imgur.com/Euv3vrr.jpg I even got to learn about HIPPI while at it. I wish I had more adventures like that.
- jamesfmilne 11y agoCool, years ago I spent many months going back & forth to Weiterstadt, working on Spirit DataCines and Spirit 2K/4K machines, adding support for controlling them via Baselight. There's some considerable engineering in those machines. Though you could replace almost all the boards with one or two FPGAs these days What are you using it with? BONES?
- Keyframe 11y agoWhen I first opened up the racks in the machine and all of those industrial electronics boards... Initially I thought I was way over my head. It took a bit of time, but now it's all clear and now I see the ingenuity of it. It's a very elegant machine and works like a charm. I had to replace a few of the things, installed new lamps, cleaned up everything and it's as good as new! I have two signals coming out. I have a HD 1080p link coming from its HD serializers (actually four outputs via two serializers) which I laid out to several inputs (Tricaster, custom built PC with 10-bit input, monitors, etc..). For when I need full 2K/10-bit, machine works at 6fps, not realtime. Currently, machine has a HIPPI output and with that I have limited options. Well, one option to be specific. An SGI machine with HIPPI card and Phantom Transfer Engine on it which then transfers DPX files to a SAN. I would like BONES, or anything else for that matter, but that would require me to get a GSN instead of HIPPI and BONES, of course. I'm still looking for options out there to see if there are any. Preferably if there's an option for PC based solution and HIPPI. If not, GSN/BONES is what I'm considering. Price of that is a bit steep though (around $30k I think), but it's still an option that is considered.
- lossolo 11y ago"IBM said the z890 will ship next month, with prices starting at $200,000." - 2004. And he got it for 237$, good deal :)
- vixate 11y agoYes, quite a deal. :) In the video @ 28:29 while showing the slide with his cost breakdown he says: "And I had someone from IBM run the serial number for me, and the original price tag was $350,000."
- sumoboy 11y agoI would hope some corp directors/cio's see this and send this kid some spare parts for a great effort. Those scumbags at IBM could care less about making this into a better story by helping out.
- dredmorbius 11y agoHe's getting help from some IBMers via MAIN. I suspect sidechannel support may be viable. I've only done a small bit of MF work, but the old-school IBM mainframers I've met (usually at conferences) have always been exceptionally helpful and friendly. It's a fairly small community. Young blood is often quite welcomed. And those beasts will likely be around so long as there's mains power.
- tgflynn 11y agoThe value seems to have depreciated even faster than for consumer hardware. I think you would expect to pay a bit more than $2 for a working laptop that sold for $2k in 2004.
- jsjohnst 11y agoThe laptop would be more useful to most people, even being a 2004 model. The market for folks with a use for a machine like this is very slim, even slimmer those who can deal with its weight/size/electrical draw. That said, man I wish I had the space for one!
- amelius 11y agoIs this part of a new movement where people move "the cloud" into their own homes?
- wiseleo 11y agoI have a couple of IBM X366 servers. They are quad-Xeon with 8GB of RAM each. They require two power supplies to be plugged in or otherwise will keep fans turned on full power constantly. They are inefficient for daily use, but great for lab work. I spin them up, run whatever distributed task I need on 8 cores with 15K SAS drives, usually distributed Sony Vegas renderer, and shut them down. They also make a great lab for virtual machine work, so that does mean bringing the cloud in-house. :) The X366 is a serious piece of hardware that later got renamed to 3850. Their current incarnation is http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/systems/servers/mission-critical/x3850-x6/ http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/systems/servers/mission-critica...
- pgtan 11y agoSame here. I have couple of old Opteron based servers which I start only for massive parallel ImageMagick/netpbm/tesseract computations. I think this has the best price per CPU ratio.
- jkot 11y agoI 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.
- PeCaN 11y agoWoah. Where did you get it? Sounds cool. Do you run HP-UX on it or does some common Linux distro run well?
- arde 11y agoLinux works fine.
- jkot 11y agoEbay. It runs Lubuntu, I develop java
- mappu 11y agoSome similar machines (HP Proliant, 24 cores, 256GB ram) on eBay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/381566357980 http://www.ebay.com/itm/381566357980 That's 1500USD. I'm sure 900USD is possible if you keep an eye out, seems like a pretty sharp deal though.
- eb0la 11y agoAnd you can have a nice tensorflow box stuffing this puppy with 3-4 nvidia cards ;-).
- Jerry2 11y agoHow much processing power does IBM z890 have? What's it comparable to today?
- kpil 11y agoLess than you think. Recent x64 is a great deal faster than recent System Z if you compare just a single core. I think the total bandwidth is still better, but I don't know with how much if you compare high end systems. I would guess you can give a z890 a good match with a raspberry pi 3... Unless it's IO bound... A quick google says: 2451 mips on a 4-core raspberry pi 3 against 9000 mips on a 32-core z990... hmmm.
- bluedino 11y agoThere's money to be made in the IBM midrange market. The company I work for is still using the iSeries (although we're switching to TOP_5_CLOUD_ERP system as we speak), and we use Apache and PHP to connect to modern systems. Every year, IBM is at the user conference for the software we currently use. They're always showing off their newest Linux machine with 200 cores and I don't know why, because half the people there aren't even using bar coding, and everyone there is a small fry. Here's where a niche developer comes in. You can use Java which is supported by IBM, Zend has a nice PHP setup, and IBM'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'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! These customers aren'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'll gladly spend $50k to integrate some simple workflow. 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 'intricacies' of doing it on the IBM.
- bencollier49 11y agoYou didn't do that work for a water treatment plant by any chance, did you?
- donatj 11y agoA company I used to work for built online shopping carts. We were building one for an industrial company who's inventory system ran on an AS/400, and we were doing an integration. I had ZERO familiarity with IBM mainframes at the time and presumed (wrongly) that it ran some flavor of UNIX. I was to work with their lead developer to get the integration going. He was maybe late 50s, I never met him face to face, only over the phone. I suggest that they build a "simple JSON or XML API" for us to connect to. This makes their lead very uncomfortable. He does NOT want to put the machine on the public facing Internet (reasonable enough) and has never worked with XML or JSON. He instead wants to set up a system where hourly it would email us CSV diffs. Maintaining data working from diffs sounded like a nightmare to me, plus I'd never programmaticly worked with receiving emails. Whole thing sounded iffy. Plus understanding their data model it would not be shoved into CSV without a fight. After a bunch of back and forth (weeks) we work out a system where the server would upload a combination of CSV and XML to an FTP share we controlled and I could reprocess the data hourly. It actually worked reasonably well. I'm curious if it's still in operation, I've long forgotten the name of the company we built this for, there were just so many.
- wiseleo 11y agoI love that someone offered to buy time on his machine. Pro tip: when someone offers money for using something about which you don't care, say "Sure, how much do you think you need to get started?"
- nodesocket 11y agoAnybody else try to ssh into it? $ ssh root@73.250.101.107 I thought maybe the port would be still open and using password authentication. :-)
- mc808 11y agos/101/181/ Still up, and it does prompt for a password. But he said the Chinese had been trying to get in for 2 weeks and failed, so it's probably not something obvious.
- nodejscloud 11y agoAhhh, thanks for the find/replace. Why is he not using public key authentication? Or even better, limiting access with a firewall.
- Symbiote 11y agoIt's unlikely to be a problem. "The Chinese" (botnets) probe my ssh daemons all the time, but only with common, poor passwords.
- lcfcjs 11y agowhat is this crap and why does it have so many votes? If you've worked a ton with these machines, you'll know they are pieces of crap and theres a reason why technology has moved on.
- hvs 11y agoI 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. [1] http://www.hercules-390.eu/ http://www.hercules-390.eu/ http://www.bsp-gmbh.com/turnkey/ http://www.bsp-gmbh.com/turnkey/
- markbnj 11y agoLaughed out loud when he introduced the power roadblock, and the pic of that connector.
- randlet 11y agoVery 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!
- cordite 11y agoI've never heard of a computer running on three phase power before. That was unique. 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 "battle" against each other.
- timc3 11y agoI wouldn’t say that it was that unusual.
- seryoiupfurds 11y agoMan, I regret that I arrived one term too late to get a full System/390 from my university. That thing would have been sweet in my dorm room.
- sumoboy 11y agoHe should find an old Sun e10000 or e15000 now to fill up his basement.
- rbobby 11y agoKinda funny at the end... they zoom out and so much grey hair and bald heads :)
- sandra_saltlake 11y agoI love read much about this
- krylon 11y agoOwning my personal mainframe is a long-held dream of mine, but practically, it wouldn't make a lot of sense unless somebody would let me put it into their datacenter. 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. So I envy this person, a lot, but realistically, I would not want to buy one for myself. (IIRC, during the S/390 days, IBM built a 4U mini-mainframe one could rack-mount. There also was the P/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...)
- kabdib 11y ago... and the power bill would bankrupt you :)
- kjs3 11y agoThe P/390 is very nifty (and there were Microchannel versions as well as PCI), as is the earlier XT/370 & AT/370 (ISA-bus implemented in re-microcoded mc68000s). More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-based_IBM-compatible_mainframes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-based_IBM-compatible_mainfr... These days there's always the Hercules emulator to get your IBM fix. http://www.hercules-390.eu/ http://www.hercules-390.eu/ Me? I'm looking for a Micro A, the desktop version of the Burroughs B5000 mainframe.
- y04nn 11y agoBig 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.
- y04nn 11y agoJust an update, of course the seller backed off after realizing the mistake he has done, I will never own one.
- matzipan 11y agoThis reminds me of the computer collection one of the lecturers in my department owns (http://www.computermuseum.org.uk/ http://www.computermuseum.org.uk/). They have quite a number of historical pieces finishing with a number of Crays, an IBM Blue Gene a few nuclear plant control units.
- hauget 11y agoLove this kid. It'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: "Just for fun". That said, I'm also a tad jealous of him. I would have loved to grow up with a crazy lab to hack around with!