I am interested in mainframes. They have some pretty awesome hardware, great reliability parameters, and some seriously interesting modes of operation. You kno

I am interested in mainframes. They have some pretty awesome hardware, great reliability parameters, and some seriously interesting modes of operation. You know how we like to throw data at a hadoop cluster and do a lot of big batch map-reduce jobs? A lot of those end up being very similar to the types of batch jobs mainframes are great at. Distributed transactions/shards/etc for our databases? Again, stuff mainframes have been doing for decades. The problem as I see it is access. Sure, like the SO poster mentioned, Hercules exists, but you can't really run modern mainframe OSes on it (legally and easily that is). Further, you can't really get the same experience, because you don't have the hardware offload or partitioning available to you for real. Heck every time I think I should look into the beasts, I can't even find decent technical documentation describing things. Compare most of the stacks people on this site use - there are complaints if the documentation isn't formatted right, let alone if it is incomplete or wrong... I regularly see things people are talking about and/or doing here, and think "man I think mainframes solved that years ago, it sure would be nice to play around with doing this on a Z series". Of course since I can't just do that, I say whatever and play with it on a few linux instances and then can use it myself - with actual knowledge and some experience. This is why I think no one is interested in mainframes: we can't play. We can't say, how can I...? We can't cut our chops by building a million and one little tools that grow up into really helpful software for everyone. We can't just whip out our phones and read about it when we are whiling away our time in line at the coffee shop or futz with things on an airplane. It's that when compared to the availability of software and information of the bazaar, the high priesthood of mainframes with their mysteries and closed access can't provide us with what we need to just build.