An 18 Year Old Buys a Mainframe [video]
This is so cool.  Especially given that this thing can run Linux.<p>I had a sorta-kinda similar experience in college years ago.   My college (a small community college in the middle of nowhere) had received an IBM AS/400 machine as a donation.   I signed up for some "Survey of Operating Systems" class, and when I showed up the first day, the instructor (who already knew me) goes "Phil, your job is to take the AS/400, install an OS and get it on the Internet".  Needless to say, at that point in time, I'd never seen or touched an AS/400 before.<p>Anyway, the instructor pointed me to a room with an AS/400, a huge stack of tapes (for the OS), a huge stack of manuals, and basically said "just do it."   It was an interesting experience, but in the end, I got the thing on the 'net so you could telnet to it and work on it.  And that indirectly led to the beginnings of my career in IT, as my first real IT job was as an AS/400 operator / Netware admin, and it was a job this instructor connected me with after this class.<p>So here's to taking vintage IBM equipment and dorking around with it and putting it on the Internet!