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Comment by unixhero | Hacker News Reader

IBM are you here? Are you listening? Make the mainframe hobbyist friendly.

(How else will you train new evangelists? How else will you get more operators from younger generations?)

It could be really fun to have a desktop pc with a mainframe processor like that, though that is unlikely to happen. For now you can sign up at https://linuxone.cloud.marist.edu for access to a 2 vCPU LinuxONE vps running on one which is pretty cool

Wondering about the same with POWER 10 too. I got bored with consumer tech for a long time and really want to look at all these exotic niche tech. It is interesting both of them happens to come from IBM. So while I think their software sucks, their Hardware team seems to be operating on a different dimension.

With POWER you at least have something like https://www.raptorcs.com/ Though I don't think they will be using POWER10, at least not this year anyways.

https://twitter.com/raptorcompsys/status/1295364416469377026...

I don't fully agree with the sentiment that it would be IBM's responsibility to cater to hobbyists (nor do I think that programming in, say, COBOL or PL/1 is actually fun), but if you must try on a limited budget, there is the Hercules emulator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_(emulator)

There is also moshix' youtube channel covering the topic.

I am not on a limited budget. I spend tens of thousands of dollars to learn. But will not invest millions for a mainframe.

What is frustrating is that IBM has a System Z emulation environment for developers called zPDT. It costs $7K/yr and is only available to registered ISVs. Really wish they would drop that cost and make it available to anyone.

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