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Here's What Happens When an 18 Year Old Buys a Mainframe

SHARE Association · 3.2M views · 2016-03-25 · 45:12

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Overview

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.

On Hacker News

HN commenters cite it as an entertaining example of a teenager buying, hosting and booting a real mainframe.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2018–2025

Topics

History of computingComputer architecture & CPUs
Search by tags
ibm mainframez890vintage computershobby hardwarez/os

What people said

galoisgirl · 2020-12 · Recommendation

He did, his talk about it is really interesting: [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]

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laxd · 2020-05 · Recommendation

I'm shure alot of you have seen this already. If not, it's an entertaining 45 minutes [VIDEO] (Here's What Happens When an 18 Year Old Buys a Mainframe)

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timewizard · 2025-04 · Reference

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: [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by SHARE Association, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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