Probably the smartest thing IBM could do there is lower the cost to learn. They’ve kind of made their own problem by placing their knowledge behind expensive certification programs (last I knew).

Such companies though may need to up their salaries significantly. Pay is ultimately the reason show up to work.

This. IBM needs an emulator you can download and play with. I've always wanted to play with AS/400 but had no access to a non-production environment so why bother learning

A long time ago, I worked at a place which was an IBM partner (for other reasons), and I went to an iSeries training session. The user interface on these things is really ugly, didn't seem like it would be 'fun' to play around with. The interesting part was probably more the programming model.

They also said there were more iSeries in Salt Lake City than the SF Bay Area, which was HP & Sun's backyard.

Not just IBM; I've encountered a few Unisys systems in my career, and my efforts to get a local copy of those have proven super hard, too

Unisys did make their Windows-based emulators for OS2200 and MCP freely available for download (for personal/non-commercial use) for a few years.

Sadly, they appear to have now discontinued their free "hobbyist" program, although they still sell the emulator commercially (apparently, the MCP emulator costs US$11,000 for a 5-year license – some people will spend even more than that on a "hobby", but you'd have to be pretty devoted to a hobby to do that, and I doubt many people have that much devotion to a dying mainframe OS)

Still, that's better than IBM has ever done for IBM i. Not aware there has ever been an emulator for it. There are POWER emulators (QEMU for example), but while they can run AIX and Linux, I'm not aware of any which can run IBM i. Maybe IBM has one internally, but if they do, they are very tight-lipped about it. In theory, an open source emulator such as QEMU could be enhanced to be able to run it – but IBM's licensing probably won't allow it, which is part of why nobody appears to have done so.

IBM Cloud hosts IBM i, but it is rather expensive. In a US data centre, 0.25 core of an S922, 1GB RAM, 10GB disk will cost you US$382/month. By comparison, the same hardware for bring-your-own Linux will cost you US$32/month, showing how much of that is software licensing. AIX is US$39/month – much more reasonable software charges than IBM i is. RZKH PowerBunker, the German company which runs PUB400, can't do much better than IBM, given they still have to pay IBM licensing fees. Their prices start at US$200/month, which is cheaper than IBM, but actually a much lower hardware spec (1/20th of a core rather than 1/4 of a core). For equivalent hardware, they charge (roughly) double what IBM Cloud does.

I thought you could buy old models off eBay like anything else? Though I’m guessing the software is still locked up.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I was always under the impression that the AS/400 boxes at work needed 3-phase power?

The ones I've seen don't, no. The AS/400 boxes were pretty much designed for small-to-medium-sized businesses to stick in a closet and forget about. You may be thinking of IBM mainframes, which typically require three-phase power, but can be convinced to work without it.

These days (and for quite a while), the boxes that run IBM i are the same POWER servers that can run AIX and Linux. Before the platforms consolidated, they were still POWER servers, it was just a different firmware between the "i Series" (ran OS/400) and "p Series" (ran AIX and Linux) POWER boxes.

Yeah, hardware isn't the problem, it's the software licensing

Hence, pub400.com

That touches on what I thought was a glaring omission in all the computer courses I took in the 1980s: not a single one of them was taught on IBM big iron, let alone AS/400 as it was known then. Even my encounters with COBOL and FORTRAN were on a Prime 650. It seems almost like there was a conscious effort to not teach IBM mainframes.

Did IBM deploy mainframes to universities for academic purposes? I started college in 1989, and it was fully micro. We learned Pascal on 3B2 systems running SVR3. There was a VAX running 4BSD that was designated as the students' playground. I learned assembly on Apollos running DOMAIN/OS, I think, and then there was a lab full of brand-new diskless SPARCstation ELCs.

I guess some BITNET buddies might have been on VM/CMS, but I think even our student bookstore avoided selling IBMs; they had Macs and NeXT stations on the showroom floor.

In the 1960s thru early 1980s, IBM mainframes in academia were extremely common. A lot of academic research and scientific computing was done on IBM mainframes, especially under VM/CMS. Both SAS and SPSS began life on IBM mainframes. The SPIRES database of high energy physics research was hosted by Stanford SLAC on IBM mainframes for decades (and then, when they finally moved it off the mainframe, they kept running the original mainframe software in an emulator).

However, as the 1980s progressed, most of it migrated away from the mainframe, on to Unix systems and PCs. So, starting in 1989, you would have missed most of it. IBM mainframes survived longer for administrative computing (accounting, payroll, student records, etc)–but thru the 1990s and 2000s almost all of that went away too.

There are still a few colleges/universities out there who run IBM mainframes – primarily to teach them to students as a technology – Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York comes particularly to mind. But nothing like it used to be.