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

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Winston

Winston

Lorenzo von Matterhorn
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"Connor Krukosky is an 18 year old college student with a hobby of collecting vintage computers. One day, he decided to buy his own mainframe...an IBM z890. This is his story."

Very interesting, impressive and funny. A 2004 $350k mainframe he bought, transported, and got running with great effort in his parent's cellar for a total of $340.60. A huge learning experience. If you want to skip the tech issues, much of which was funny in itself, and get to a concentrated series of funny stuff, skip to the Q&A starting at 32:45.

[video=youtube;45X4VP8CGtk]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45X4VP8CGtk[/video]
 
Reminds me of my roommate from college - an absolute genius

There was a mainframe style computer for an MRI system that was obsolete and stopped working. Even the manufacturer would not / could not support it.

He got it back working in a few months
 
China has been trying to log on already? :shock: At work I'm currently setting up my first RHEL 6.6 LAMP stack using SSH port 22. I should just assume they will be trying ours as well.

Kudos to this young man's parents for being so supportive. Kids with this kind of potential need open doors to just dive in. I hope he gets the attention of a few corporate sponsors or university sponsors to give him more of what he's looking for, for free or nearly free.

It's great to see passion like this in new generations.
 
OK,
For those of us that are barely computer literate, what does a mainframe do? Is it just a huge computer that all the desktop computers in a business connect to for ?backup?

Adrian
 
Cabernut said:
China has been trying to log on already? :shock: At work I'm currently setting up my first RHEL 6.6 LAMP stack using SSH port 22. I should just assume they will be trying ours as well.
Click to expand...

China is very active, I see activity hourly on every firewall I monitor. We use GeoIP blocking, easy to get around if you know something is there but they don't so they move on. I essentially only allow connections from countries we know we are going to deal with and everyone else gets a discard. In the video when he mentioned China someone in the audience mentioning that he has added a few hundred sub-nets to block China. The problem is they have way more than that so instead of manually creating a and administering a deny or discard ACL, we just subscribe to this feature as a service and a 3rd party keeps track.

Bottom line is China and Russia are very active in cyber-crime, they aren't the only ones but they are two of the bigger players where the state either sponsors it or turns a blind eye, Ukraine is another cyber-crime haven.
 
jd2cylman said:
OK, For those of us that are barely computer literate, what does a mainframe do? Is it just a huge computer that all the desktop computers in a business connect to for ?backup?
Click to expand...
If a desktop is a Subaru BRAT running a rally course, a mainframe is a team of Australian road trains barreling down the I-10 Katy Freeway side by side.
 
dhbarr said:
If a desktop is a Subaru BRAT running a rally course, a mainframe is a team of Australian road trains barreling down the I-10 Katy Freeway side by side.
Click to expand...

Ahh, now I really understand :eyeroll:
So, can I just assume its a big(er) (huge, even) friken computer?

Adrian
 
So, now mainframes are so easy a teenager can configure them... I am too old.
 
Throw that kid a cobol mainframe and let his brain fry lol.
 
a little off topic, but it really is like WWIII out there.
https://map.norsecorp.com/#/

mpitfield said:
China is very active, I see activity hourly on every firewall I monitor. We use GeoIP blocking, easy to get around if you know something is there but they don't so they move on. I essentially only allow connections from countries we know we are going to deal with and everyone else gets a discard. In the video when he mentioned China someone in the audience mentioning that he has added a few hundred sub-nets to block China. The problem is they have way more than that so instead of manually creating a and administering a deny or discard ACL, we just subscribe to this feature as a service and a 3rd party keeps track.

Bottom line is China and Russia are very active in cyber-crime, they aren't the only ones but they are two of the bigger players where the state either sponsors it or turns a blind eye, Ukraine is another cyber-crime haven.
Click to expand...
 
Well, I picked the smallest highway-speed truck I could think of, and the largest.

Mainframes excel at throughout, parallelism, concurrency, redundancy, and redundancy :)
 
I wonder if his parents have received their monthly power bill yet... :)

The Digital VAX 8600 that we had many moons ago used 480V 3-phase power at 60 amps, and blow hot air out of the back requiring two 10-ton A/C units to cool it. It was a beast.
 
cerving said:
I wonder if his parents have received their monthly power bill yet... :)

The Digital VAX 8600 that we had many moons ago used 480V 3-phase power at 60 amps, and blow hot air out of the back requiring two 10-ton A/C units to cool it. It was a beast.
Click to expand...
He mentioned that and with his minimal configuration, it's working fine off of a 15A breaker. He was actually hoping it would heat the cellar, but it doesn't put out much heat, another good sign of reasonable power consumption.
 

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