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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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)

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