I started programming professionally back in 1990 on IBM mainframes. I used to daydream about buying an old machine to run in the basement. (But shortly after the 386 and 486 machines started hosting emulators that allowed mainframe programming on the desktop. My burning desire for a home mainframe died out.)
They give out free remote shell accounts to a number of their mainframes actually, or if you go in person they encourage you to write code on the machines they have. It’s a “living” museum.
The Living Computer Museum, funded by the late Paul Allen, does indeed keep their computers running and offer accounts. You can request a login at the following link
The Computer History Museum in Mountain View California has a few old computers running, but is mostly a display museum.
At the Living Computer Museum I logged into a DEC-2060 on a VT100 terminal and amazed my younger friends by navigating around the system and firing up a few ancient text based games. Being of the hacker mindset, I also showed them all the information you could get about logged in users prior to logging in from which one could have used to guess account credentials back in the day...
Explaining and demoing the COMND JSYS was quite fun. The COMND JSYS provided command line parsing and completion, one of the predecessors to t-shell, bash, and other shells with completion. I had a great time revising the past and highly recommend you visit with an old-skool programmer.
For those who are curious you can read about the COMND JSYS on page 164 (chapter 3, pg 52) of the following document
I hadn't realized the connection between the old Boston museum and the one in Mountain View. My recollection was that the collection went to the Boston Museum of Science when the museum in Boston shut down. That's partly true but its warehouse collection had moved to Mountain View earlier and other artifacts later. So the holdings ended up in both places.
They didn't make for good home computers. In college in 1991-1992, I was an operator for VAX/VMS mainframes, and some HP and DEC minicomputers. I wanted something to play around with at home, so I bought some surplus stuff that the school was auctioning. I can't remember exactly what I got, but it was a rack-mount DEC machine that weighed 100lbs or so, along with a similar-sized hard drive unit (that only held about 8MB).
The thing needed a 220V outlet, sounded like a jet turbine, and probably drew a few thousand watts. And it was less powerful than the i386 desktop I had (running early Linux).
I see people buying all these old machines (everything from old DEC/IBM to newer non-mainframe SGI) and I'm super jealous for a few minutes. Then I consider the power-consumption. That's what makes me think, "hmmmm, maybe I'll just build a mini-emulation with a few Raspberry Pis or something". Yes, it would seriously not be the same at all. But having supported AS/400 with reel-to-reel tape drives... and huge greenbar printer... yeah, maybe emulation is just fine.
I worked on an OS390 for a little while and had a copy of the editor which ran on a PC. It was called SPF/PC and was pretty interesting and also allowed me to practice on it at home.
One thing, unique at the time I think, was you could selectively hide rows and then perform column operations on just the visible ones. Very handy when you needed it!
I started programming professionally back in 1990 on IBM mainframes. I used to daydream about buying an old machine to run in the basement. (But shortly after the 386 and 486 machines started hosting emulators that allowed mainframe programming on the desktop. My burning desire for a home mainframe died out.)
Good times....