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In the winter of 2018, I purchased a decommissioned IBM Z800 mainframe from the City of Milwaukee from a government liquidation website. I disassembled the machine, loaded it into a U-Haul truck, and brought it home to Chicago. I payed $23 for the mainframe which also came with some old broken tape drives. After scrapping the tape drives and paying for the truck rental, I ended up making $200 on just purchasing the mainframe alone. But the machine had definitely seen better days. There was a critical cooling fan failure and the Z800 was setup for the older ESCON environment.
Z800 loaded in U-Haul
Getting the mainframe running for the first time from the SE's
Learning how to work on this 2,000 lb computer was a slow and involved process. I began reading all the documentation on the Z800 as possible. This not only helped me understand the internal workings of the mainframe, but it also gave me a template for strong technical writing. I corresponded with other IBM mainframers and found myself in the midst of the supportive mainframer community.
With knowledge gained from the hours spent reading documentation and with the help of some new friends I was able successfully get my IBM Z800 mainframe running. I rewired to 3-phase power supply cables so that the machine would run on two 240V outlets and replaced the old ESCON data connections with faster FICON connections. A created a a fiber channel SAN for inexpensive data storage which required me to reprogram the I/O configuration data set (IOCDS) files so that the mainframe could operate in the new environment.
I have gained so many skills from this project ranging from configuring an environment with Fibre Channel Drives to the daily task of effectively communicating with fellow mainframers.
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