[_lbaq]

I think its a great career niche to be fluent in everything Mainframe, they are still used in critical places and will be for the foreseeable future and they are largely overlooked as a opportunity.

So if you want to work in this niche, having your own Mainframe will greatly speed up learning the system.

It probably also looks awesome when you market yourself.

So all in all, 25k USD for kickstarting a potentially very profitable career sounds like a bargain ....

[icedchai]

If you just want to learn the software, you can set up Hercules mainframe emulator for free. Finding an image of z/OS is left as an exercise to the reader, but won't take you long.

http://www.hercules-390.org/

[bluecmd]

Hi, author here. Spot on! It is pretty common to see mainframe courses for $10k each - so given how much I hope to learn I kind of justify the cost just on that. Now, I do not expect to change to work on mainframes full time, but maybe it can grow into a side gig? Who knows! I do enjoy the process anyhow so it feels like a win-win :-).

Thanks for reading!

[lexs]

I think we have very different definitions of "a bargain".