There were places around that rent time. There was also a place offering free accounts, I don't even remember the name now. There's one hell of a learning curve, makes it really hard to do anything other than poke around when you don't know the params to code in a jcl to compile a program. My first gig was mainframe cobol, the company put everyone thru a 3 month training program, that's the only reason I know anything about it.