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

all right so my name is Connor Krakowski I assume you all know why you're here why I'm here I hope title keeps that away so I title is I just bought IBM Z 890 now what well bought it a couple months ago it's been a couple months of quite the adventure so and that's what this entire presentation is about so Who am I all right well I had a computer in my hands at 18 months old my parents gave me a system and I believe it was an IBM Activa so you could say I've come from the circle with IBM none of my toy stayed together very long as a kid I learned what a screwdriver was and I used it to my the best of my ability I had a craving to learn more about electronics these chips and inside of all these devices intrigued me and so I aspired to become an electrical engineer and so I started collecting vintage computers about two three years ago and well it's the reason why I would probably be because I it's everything simpler you can see everything instead of having a couple million transistors on a die you have a couple hundred TTL logic gates chips and it's quite easy to understand and learn basics of digital electronics that way starts collecting slowly some single microcomputers Apple twos things like that Commodore 64's but it wasn't long before well I was filling up the back of my truck with stuff and you you will notice that that is no.26 keypunch for I'm sure some people in the room are familiar so anybody want to guess how much I paid for that some people know a little more nine dollars on eBay so some other stuff there and and this those are 3270 terminals terminal controller there's there's another terminal controller a smaller one so yeah and and also this so this is a data general Nova for I drove to Minnesota and back to get that from Maryland's two thousand mile round-trip or so so yeah it was all downhill from here my parents basically accepted the fact they said no more please but they knew it wasn't going to stop so then this happens on a veggie burger mailing list kind of off topic but you know I know some people are interested and post about it and I responded accordingly of course so yeah we moved into a new house and there were apparently two air exchangers in the house and the one in the basement needed work so there's literally no heat in the basement so I wasn't joking there were of course warnings from the concern some close friends of mine Dave he actually has his own z8 behind me and yeah then of course there were jokes from a not so concerned so yeah I so this didn't stop me I also I'd already been on it like a second without even thinking of how much it weighed or whatever so I so I started planning I talked to my parents by getting a new machine they were like god no please and I said oh don't worry it's only 1,500 pounds that was seven feet deep three feet wide five feet tall 6 feet tall some like that so so I realized that was pretty much screwed moving this thing I weigh like 120 pounds I could I can barely push this thing across the floor so I realized I had to take two trips to get this thing one to take out most everything out of the rack and the next trip take the rest out and move the rack itself although I didn't know how much the rack alone weighed so but before I realized that I had won the machine for two hundred thirty seven dollars and thirty nine cents and you can see at the time well actually this was quite a bit after only 250 people even looked at it this was actually I think even after I posted about it so you can see how many people are actually even care about an old mainframe so and about a week later it began I worked out with the people who were holding it and by the way I purchased this from Rutgers University in New Jersey so that I told them I was gonna take two trips I was gonna disassemble the machine they said that's fine and they'd help me load it so I took a part this was the first day went from everything in the front to basically stripped down to just the CP cage and the i/o cage and yeah basically all that was left was those cages and that was the back of my truck I actually had I had a lunch at my grandparents house so I had to come back and with this truckload of stuff so you can see the CPS they're very very static protected I yeah I basically figured if if I can get it in the basement that's good enough for me it will be a great paperweight at least so then there was the big move I had two friends come with me I had someone who's nearby in the area that came and helped so I came up with my truck and a trailer and you can see they are the two very large that's the i/o cage and that's the CP booklet cage just huge heavy things to people that move that so both those came out of the rack and there's what it looked like from my position I made sure my friends were at least somewhat safe I so yeah and then the rack on the trailer basically we rolled it up to the back of the trailer and three people just three four people just lifted from the bottom and up until cleared up on the trailer it was actually my friends trying to figure out how we're gonna get this thing up on the trailer and one of the guys working there said oh let me help he comes up and my friends are just about to get ready and he lifts the thing up and he wasn't a big guy either I was I wasn't sure who I just met but I consider ignorance like a 2-inch thick steel plate in the bottom that thing I I was impressed so and everything was going great right no I had to go drinks it it wasn't going to fit underneath the deck and this is the first roadblock of the entire project so this house has an on a half in ground door into the basement and a deck over top of it not just a walk-in basement and that's what really why I realized that was screwed when I was moving this thing started a walk-in basement it was gonna be easy but yeah so must dig deeper so my father excavated some lands with his Kubota yes he he he sort of did it by himself I was like okay we got to go dig up some more land and he's like Oh it'll be easy we'd do that he got out the rototiller filled it up now the rack sat outside actually for two days but but it's empty it's just and of course that rack I don't want to know what would it would take to destroy that and things built too well so and this this was the squeeze yeah so that was mostly because it was sitting on some plywood and it was pressing up against that but there was probably only like an inch of space so and it was very tight squeeze so like an inch on that side an inch on that side two ton hoists to lower it down and so moving all of the other pieces into the basement I weighed everything except the very large chassis and I estimated the rack itself probably weighs about 800 pounds so yeah and finally lowered it down straight up in the basement and the racks the heaviest part is in the basement and you can see the other two chassis right there so and what was learns so always make sure you have a plan seriously measure twice move once I tried to move twice then measure once then move again then measure again then finally fit it underneath the deck listen your mother get a warehouse no matter what others tell you fifteen hundred pounds of mainframe will move itself if the floor isn't perfectly flat I learned that later that the basement floor is slightly curved and pushing it to one side of the basement was like an uphill battle and then the other side it was like oh crap stop rolling so and then we assembly started so my father helped me lifts the two chassis Xin and everything else so as they will again to myself our supply units this is what basically looked like covered in parts and pieces just ton of i/o modules you know and basically finished I quite honestly took no notes because after taking two photos I realized oh there's a bunch of numbers and stuff on the stickers on the connectors they're probably labels I'll just forget about taking notes and they were in fact work so I'll cut the lengths they label where you eyes in the rack they are so which module they're in then they label which module this way there and then which connector in that module they're in so it's quite nicely labeled it's was a breeze to reassemble and there it's like it's like one it's like a quarter inch socket size and one or two allen keys take apart this entire machine very very easy second roadblock was a bad thermal compound and apparently I was told this was a problem around the time this machine was made basically I assume it's the anodizing on the heat sinks or something and basically the heat sinks fall off when you remove the i/o cards and yeah they when removing i/o modules heatsinks appeared not what I expected knew it wasn't a good sign almost every module had this problem other than like to s con cards so Andrey pasting the swelled sheep like five dollars and pastes it took hours you see you have to go and scrape off that dies the chip with razor blades and it's a very delicate process not to chip those dies so if you have one of these machines check it well I guess if you're going to disassemble it you'll know third roadblock is power came with that plug I had access to that plug so yeah I had to get three-phase to single-phase urgently wired for three-phase but in the installation manual it said you can do single phase so and a friend of mine have this machine he said oh yeah I just wire up the first two phases ignore the third and you're fine phase one hot face through the neutral ground and you're fine and he's an electrical engineer so I trusted him and requires 220 at 30 amps not a maximally configured machine you can only run a certain level of machine but mine wasn't maximally configured so I'm fine it's a power well but what is that on the screen can anybody tell me what that is on the screen no well yes it is those two but what is that specific window their license agreement yep time to play the waiting game I think it takes about 15 minutes I haven't been so keen enough to record time so yeah and it's fine if you're gonna spend up a machine and leave it on for the next 10 years but if you're gonna be turning it on and off over a couple weeks it gets tiresome you know so power-on at work just fine the fans spun up sounded like I was standing next to a jet it was great so then forth fruit boxes use her hair when trying to do a power on reset giving me tons of i/o errors and I was I rearranged on the module so I thought maybe that was why I was checking stuff I realized none of the lights were coming on I didn't know if they just didn't come on till initialized so I played around on the ThinkPad for hours and solved nothing I finally decided to go around back and check some of the power cables and realized the power supply was just sat and I didn't push it all the way in and tighten it in so and of course I think it was only one power supply and it was the one that was hooked to the power supply that I was currently using so oh wow oh there we go much better last whites blinky lights so fifth roadblock was IO C D s this this is where the real learning came in I knew moving heavy stuff was difficult but I didn't know what an I OCDs was so so I had to create a new one I knew that because what they had configured they had all their old configuration in there all of their dad's D configuration so I mean so I have if anybody gets into their machine I can send you what they had hooked to it you say I shouldn't they still have all that as day because they didn't sell any or else this PowerPoint won't be so long so I learned how to do that so many PDFs later help with someone at from someone else that knew nothing about IFC DSS either this sort of throwing ideas back and forth finally created a an LCS that didn't throw an error didn't necessarily work but it didn't throw an error so yeah and so there's there's the old by OCDs huge long thing tons of stuff that's that's the new one but I didn't need all that so or I didn't have all of that I wish I did but so time to load over FTP so I thought what wait where do you attach the land I didn't think about this before I was like okay I'm just gonna load over FTP and wait I gotta attach it somehow so I knew what an osha card was at the time and I was like so this this isn't configured anywhere until something loads up and I was like okay so whatta ya I figured out that you attach it to the land port on the ThinkPad and it loads through that I didn't actually know what those ports before I thought maybe for remote Hardware management consoles but you know so f DB password don't put special characters in it I learned the hard way hours thinking it was a network problem thinking I had it open the wrong place thinking just something was often and I was sitting there like okay am I just typing this password wrong typed it really slowly oh the exclamation mark didn't go in okay that's simple fix but hours but finally loading over FTP cd-rom you may ask my sport elements don't have cd-rom so so success I loaded think blue and in the operating system messages anyway so all right let's try us as H work perfectly so progress has been made here's the sixth roadblock this is what the next half of the slot of half the presentation is about so I saw this coming from Iowa I knew that that he was going to be an expensive issue but I figured now I worry about that later so I got to that later and now all proper fly contest can be storages way too expensive thousands of dollars from what I've mostly seen trust me I've searched for hours I've seen some people score stuff cheap but I haven't see didn't see anything pop up all Boston tag storage is too hard to get but anybody knows of any let me know I will hook it to that machine well then tell me about it so yeah so the other option I knew about was San attach to a bike on port via fibre channel protocol so started to gather stuff with that plan in mind because it was dirt cheap so this is the list of stuff I got for that plan in mind sand that a gateway it's basically just converts scuzzy to fiber channel switch I didn't think I'd need it but I actually ended up eating it scuzzy converter because I learned the difference between differential and single ended scuzzy LLC the LLC LLC the SC just got to just the case one problem HP old HP storage work I got that for free from a professor of mine so and SFP transceiver here remember that one so this is the mess of a storage setup here so there's the scuzzy array there's sand at a gateway there's the switch there's the scuzzy converter which is meant for inside of a case it's out of a PC case so have a Bolex and Dell power supply worried that might blow up at some point so no so seventh roadblock storage again so I had to figure out how to actually configure fibre channel protocol I've never touched it before let alone actually scuzzy so mainly the same sand out a gateway had to configure that I had no idea how to figure that I knew there's a serial port on it hooked up to it got a console see ya headaches ensued with that all of that so did you remember that that module yeah so after two days of not being able to get it working I learned that C 890 has long wave and all my stuff had short wave I obviously haven't messed with fibre before either so yeah user strikes again and of course I have to wait a week for that to get shipped off eBay so this is where I got I with the San instantly I installed CentOS that was great that this took hours then the eighth roadblock IPL so this is where the project had a dead end for a while I couldn't i PL the machine because I was missing feature code 904 that's the scuzzy IPL feature code and it was it was a free feature code back in a day but it's not offered anymore so all I need is the floppy disk but anybody has that floppy disk let me know three and a half inch so ya may have been away to modify the Installer to see the fibre channel storage and load that way but I sort of didn't know where to start with that and I didn't know to mess with that so I just sort of went looking for storage vikon s con based storage so this this is why we can't have nice things this is what the feature code looks like you usually don't have these options you have normal and clear so with all of this addressing so now what main option I have been keeping it now and was it used yes 6,000 and 8,000 tend to be expensive over $1000 on ebay some pop up cheaper but it frequently other options I was contacted by a company named fundamental software incorporated FSI they had an option that while out of my price range they graciously lent me to get the machine up and running before share so flex Club essentially PCI cards some may be familiar with it acts as esque on everything that is the tape consoles communications printers card reader punch you can read more about them there because I don't know about it that much so they basically sent a setup box and I went running with it so and basically what it is it's just boxed emulates everything hoax the mainframes it's great that's what I've what I needed so installation attempt number two this time I'm stalling on they add sixteen thirty nine ninety mod nine setup so small but numerous I could have gone with FBA as some have told me but they already had that setup so I just went with it and insulation for real this time I went with Zeus as recommendation from mark post he did contact me about share so what can he do so yeah that took forever to install like six hours or so one point four six gigs currently takes six hours on an older machine you know done IPL's there we go pinging Google SUSE Linux Enterprise eleven pax level for IBM s 393 CPS works so I will come over here and connect to it oh did I lose Wi-Fi I forgot to pray to the demo gods I'm sorry okay okay it's going now there we go I'm so friend of mine installed links for fun so we'll go to share org oh there we go there is shared org and text mode and for fun well we'll go to IBM calm and what I find is apparently they have some default content here yes yeah so okay I'm gonna find out where I was little bit actually no surprisingly it doesn't pump out too much heat yeah I was actually I was thinking about that but and then last week I had an emergency shut down the basement started flooding so I actually I got in contact with one IBM PR persons asked about being flown out to interconnects since this happened last week probably good thing I didn't because I would have learned the hard way that my mainframe was down and my demo wouldn't work so yeah because I was in the basement sitting at my desk when I turned around and saw water everywhere so yeah my parents wouldn't have known they'd never go down there it's my basement my mess of stuff there there's a there's a coupler modem there there's a yeah so we're fine so I know Ferb you say you want to buy your own mainframe well first you'll want to disassemble move the machine do its desired location or just move it if you have the money for a box truck truck with a lift gate reassemble check all of your connections check them all get power run for it whatever that may be whatever you have available find suitable storage good luck setup IOC d/s reset profile l par and hello to install RB FTP or DVD and install desire to us and IPL so apparently that doesn't like be formatted properly so yeah so this is the cost add up of everything I believe there's not too much after that anyway basically it comes out to about a total of $350 and and I had someone from IBM run the serial number for me and the original price tag was $350,000 so that was in fold decrease in ten years so my relationship of IBM this has changed over share so a few people from IBM of giving me good info from IBM main I haven't tried contacting anyone specifically from IBM I figured share would be a good resource for that got in contact with one our PR people through someone I know about speaking of interconnect gotta the word I just assumed they were busy they probably had better things to be doing but so but you know I did however learn that get cos 1.13 for $125 a month for his like three myths so I'm sure it was a sales rep doing his job so another idea employer in serial number show me the original price so what's next get a working vs 6000 or other storage solution in the picture of the storage you may have noticed I had something vs 6000 related and I do but I haven't been able to get working so I'm problems with that hook up a real 3270 terminal to the machine the the 31 74-61 are that I have for fun you know Amber's a nice color possibly play around with zbm 5.3 eval addition I just need an HM C to install it which some people have already talked to me about so maybe and you know other things like testing out running things say like a website on it for say database performance because i/o throughput on a mainframe is clearly superior to say x86 so and here's here's the thanks slide so my parents was joker Koski for being so supportive you could probably only imagine mark posts were originally reaching out to me about speaking at share phil smith i sitting right here from HP who helps get HP just watch my way out which was very kind of them and if anybody has ties with them thank them for me so Neil Ferguson a fill again for inviting me to Hill Gang to give a test run of my speech so that I could get feedback and make sure that I give you the best presentation I could Gary Amon from SFI for getting me the Flex cab on loan everyone from IBM main who also gave help along the way and John Connor he was the guy who so if anybody remembers to interconnect last year if you went there was a guy who installed Minecrafts on a Z series minecraft server that's him I got in contact with him through reddit and he sat so graciously on Skype calls with me for probably like over 24 hours over a weekends helping me figure this out he's a z/os guy but he knew as much about the hardware as I did so we were both very confused so and again huge thanks to HP create my way out here and also huge thanks to FSI 4 flex club that allowed me to give you a demo and show something running on the thing instead of a sad ending where well I'm still waiting so that's it so we've got quite a bit of time for questions and that's how to contact me and bonus share Songbook that's the link to download it someone I know found someone that had this I had to get it scanned and I had to let everybody here have access to it so the question was has this experience changed my mind about being electrical engineer maybe I definitely have other options now but I Lex cool engineering is a lot of math so well maybe we'll see so the question was that my parents got the first electrical bill yet and funnily enough the first two days I ran the thing which was basically doing nothing we looked at the electric bill and the day before I even plugged it in it was actually higher usage then the two days I actually hooked it up so I I don't think this thing consumes too much at idle but under load maybe I'm actually only running it on a 20 amp breaker besets what I have available and maxing out the CPS I haven't blown the breaker so I don't I think it's probably 15 amps max so the question is do I like this shirt and yeah looks okay oh sweet yeah thank you very much so the question is how much RAM is in the machine mine has eight weeks of RAM I should also mention the bottle number probably it's a it's a 320 so three of out of the four cps enabled a two out of seven speed so question was what do I plan on doing with it now well I like I said I probably just playing around on it learning about it if I can get gos on it or zbm learn about that maybe probably programming on it and just some random interesting experience experiments that maybe nobody else has done before so yeah if anybody has any yeah if anybody has any ideas feel free there we go round of applause for this man we're out of school okay so Phil asked that I tell everyone where I'm at with school so I am eighteen years old I started college two years ago Maryland you get your GED at 16 my mother told me about this and I was like sure what do I have to lose and the GED was the easiest thing I've ever taken so I was I'm going to a small Community College near me I was mostly exploring career paths since it's cheap it was ahead of everyone anyway getting some transferable credits couldn't hurt so yeah and now I'm looking for some University to go to for electrical engineering maybe computer science we'll see and I'm basically open to suggestions so anybody wants to pitch their amazing college that they went to and had a great experience at go ahead after the talk so yeah so the house has a natural sump it's just got a drain that goes downhill and drains and there was mud that accumulated because some groundhogs that have been living under the deck so we stuck a pumper yeah yeah so stuck a pump down there and it was in it was I yeah actually could you repeat that question the question was do I have any plans to play around with the CTP do you want to say it TPF for vfe okay TPF or zfe so someone would have to give me a crash course on that because I have no idea what you're talking about yeah the other okay the other operating systems if my parents actually have talked to me about this problem it's like what if we want to sell the house and I'm like well I guess you will be selling a house and a mainframe but if I get some place to move it to before then then I suppose I will be taking it with me so yeah yes but I've so recommendation to stay away from us and tagged as the well I'm crazy enough I've already put a mainframe in my basement I like vintage computers I like repairing vintage stuff and while it would be a lot of work I would absolutely love to have some vacuum column tape drives hooked up with this thing and doing something in Linux say which which was called UNIX then probably so yeah all right are there any punch card readers punches readers or anything available in the market yes and no there are some key punches on eBay that people want like 15 grand for they're out of their mind and for readers good luck readers just don't exist key punches were plentiful enough that they sort of are out there but the readers I don't I've never seen one for sale so what's next well I believe I've received this question twice now so I'm trying to come up with different answers each time to make it interesting but I'm gonna I'm gonna run out of things so I just quite honestly I want to use this machine for learning experience obviously so I want to try everything within my reach within a reasonable amount of time my parents probably don't want to keep paying to power this thing even though it doesn't consume much they think it does so yeah so I was being told about music Magilla University or student interactive computer so yeah I mean sounds like something interesting to do with it and so a funny story about recouping costs on this machine a day or two after I post about it posted about it on IBM main a small company that does barcode printing for z/os or something contacted me and said would you be sharing or selling time on this yeah I was like uh I yes if I ever get it running yeah they said that's fine we already found someone and I was like wait you're serious so yeah absolutely and then the question was is there any more room in my parents basement what my parents are doing with that they don't have to know about it have-have I contacted IBM or talk to IBM about more resources to for my mainframe and yes I have I've been talking with them and they've been talking with me so yeah I think hopefully within the future I will have a little bit more running on it and maybe even make it available for other people will be messing around on so that they can also learn because I I could give you the IP address I don't care anybody could connect to it I'll give you the route log and blow it up I have a backup I would I would watch I would much rather see someone blow it up it would be funny so yeah the flash cub when does license expire for the Flex cub when do I have to get other dad's the I they gave me like six months or like seven months something like that so it's it's a while but it's it's slow small compared to vikon obviously because s cons quite a bit slower than flake on this machine a spike on four gig which is slow compared to what they have now 16 gigs so you know but it still miles better than s Khan and so I would like to be able to play around with that performance and see what it has to offer the question I'd like to say I think you've raised the bar so if if you actually want to connect I will so there's the IP address it's just standard SSH port 22 and yes I know that's probably not a good idea and I know it's not because China has been trying to log in I kid you not for the last two weeks I've been getting SSH attempts from China but they haven't got in yet so okay Connor a big round of applause

Channel: SHARE Association

Views: 2,234,189

Rating: 4.4217124 out of 5

Keywords: mainframe, IBM, IBM Mainframe, vintage computers, linux, mainframe education

Id: 45X4VP8CGtk

Length: 45min 11sec (2711 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 25 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/petemate]

I didn't understand anything with all those abbreviations.. Also, what would one use it for? I get the shits and gigles part of owning a 350k unit, but what when the novelty wears out? Does it actually perform any task at a level that could rival modern desktop computers?

[u/zakqwy]

Great talk!

[u/atari26k]

Great video. Watch the whole thing thinking the same thing as the audience member who said that he had just raised the expectations of our kids these days.

Thanks for sharing it!

[u/boarhog]

Here's a reddit thread about it

https://www.reddit.com/r/IBM/comments/3relk4/i_just_bought_an_ibm_z890/

[u/Ubergeeek]

This guy is a Redditor. He originally shared his story here.

[u/cancelyourcreditcard]

220 30 amp is what my hot water heater feeds from. Ouch.

[u/bent_my_wookie]

This is frankly awe inspiring. Witnessing the level of concentration and dedication necessary to master a system that took thousands of brilliant minds to develop is an accomplishment in itself. Despite being an ancient technology, this video is a resume that will last a lifetime.

[u/cleuseau]

How did you end up IPLing it? Used to be you could just call an attached modem and you were golden.

[u/RounderKatt]

Is this you in the video?