[jandrese]

My interest in doing this (my wife would kill me anyway) kind of evaporated when in almost every paragraph he hit on licensing issues you might have. What a headache for someone who just wants to tinker on the hardware and maybe buy a few parts off ebay for the full experience. I have no doubt software updates, documentation, and everything is locked behind some portal that requires you to have a stupidly expensive support contract to access.

[dboreham]

Shout out to HP (fka Dec) with their support for hobby use of VMS. I have a couple of VAXen (just desktop microvax, no need to get excited) that I had running 15 years ago using the hobby license, which it seems still exists : https://www.hpe.com/h41268/live/index_e.aspx?qid=24548

[mrbill]

It definitely still exists - I used my old DECUS membership number to get a new set of license PAKs (and a link to download the install media and software kits) last week.

[jschwartzi]

My second thought about this was "no wonder IBM is largely dead outside of stodgy corporate IT. Nobody can actually learn to use it without dropping $100,000+ on equipment."

[pickle-wizard]

Back when I was at IBM one of the hats I wore was AS/400 administrator and programmer.

I miss working with it and would like to buy one for my home lab, but the licensing is a killer. I find used ones on the market, but they usually don't include the license keys or media, and without a support contract can't get them.

I really wish IBM had a hobbyist program. I wouldn't expect it be free, but I wouldn't mind paying a small yearly fee.

[msla]

The irony is that IBM had one of the first Open Source communities: SHARE, dating back to 1955, shared software up to and including a whole OS, SOS (SHARE Operating System), well before Unix or home computers even existed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHARE_(computing)

[Jtsummers]

https://www.ibm.com/it-infrastructure/z/education/master-the...

There's a contest open to students, but anyone can sign up to use these resources.

[Spooky23]

It’s worse than that. Most of these environments are in the stodgiest corner of those companies. I worked with one a long time ago as a consultant where we struggled with an authentication related issue.

The response from the service owners was that they weren’t going to switch to a new, unproven methodology. In this case the “new” thing was around since like 1989 (this happened circa 2003). They still use whatever they were using today.

As a new hire, you’re screwed. Anyone getting into mainframes is insane.