- Actually it's funny, I've had people come up to me and be like, "Have you heard of that kid with the Mainframe?" And I'm like, "Hi. That's me." - [Dad] About several years ago, Connor started collecting vintage computers. He was bringing home teletype machines, big old tape drives. - These types of things, it sounds like "Shouldn't that be in a museum?" It's like, maybe, but it's in my basement. I've just always loved to know what makes something tick, and it's just turned towards computers. I guess I could've become a doctor and cut people open, but it turned out to be computers that I wanna rip open instead so... We've got things here, like this a PC. IBM PC XT in the box. - I think it was either seventh or eighth grade science fair. While most of the kids were doing the volcanoes type projects and growing plants, Connor built a hydrogen gas generator, and was actually generating hydrogen. In fact, he told me not to play with it when it was in the garage and I did, and I almost blew it up. - [Connor] Once we got moved into this house, I kind of finagled a deal to get the basement, I started filling it with stuff. - [Dad] When he gets his mind set on wanting something, he's pretty convincing about it. Which is kind of where we got with the Mainframe. - Of course, we have the Mainframe. The thing that everybody talks about, and everybody knows me for specifically. - He saw an ad for an IBM Mainframe that was about 10 years old I think. And he decided that he wanted this thing. We actually tried to talk him out of it a little bit in the beginning. He brought this thing home and it was just huge. - [Connor] We got it off the trailer, kind of got it over to the side of the basement and realized it wasn't going to get under the deck. - [Dad] We had to bring up a chain fall up under the deck to lower it down into the basement well, and then send it through the door. - Flip the big red switch, and it will come up slowly. I hooked it up and I flipped the switch, and it came up and everything worked fine. - [Dad] He spent the next three months basically living like a hermit in our basement, learning how to get it up and working. - It's 12, 13 years old, and computers today are barely catching up to it. So it's interesting to think that that was that far ahead at the time. - Somewhere along the way, people kind of started getting interested that this 18-year-old kid had a full size IBM Mainframe in his basement. Somebody wanted him to come and speak in Texas to his experience with this Mainframe. And we were kind of like, "Wow." That was one of our first inklings that this might be actually something that was good for him. - It's been a couple months of quite the adventure. That's what this entire presentation is about. I gave the talk, and somebody from IBM, Mark Benson, he was like, "This needs to be "on YouTube in two weeks." At first, it was like a few thousand views comes in and I'm like, "Wow. "That's getting a lot of views." And it was like, hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand, and I'm like, "Uh what's going on here." - After his speech in Texas, I know IBM approached him and asked him to come up for a tour. - I was like "Hey, can I get a tour "of the Poughkeepsie plant?" and they were like, "Wait, you know what Poughkeepsie is?" and I'm like, "Yeah, that's where the mainframe "was created, that's where the original 360 "was built." I know a lot about the history of these machines, I don't really think that they expected that. And they were like, "Yeah, sure. "we'll give you a tour of Poughkeepsie." You know, now I work there. I've never really known what I wanted to do, but collecting vintage computers, IBM's always kind of stood out on top. It's this company that's kind of done everything, and they've kind of always made the standard, the PC, the mainframe itself. I've always been like, "That's the company "that I would like to work at." I even have things like bus and tag cables. The idea behind these is, this is how they used to transport data to and from say, tape drives, or DASD hooked to the mainframe. People have the misconception of, oh, you know, you'll never get a job doing A, because it's so niche, well mainframes are pretty niche, but also there's a lot of job openings coming up now. If you want job security, get into mainframes. You can make a lot more noise if I do the full power up sequence. My parents could have shot me for getting this thing, and I wouldn't be here, I wouldn't have a job, I wouldn't have a house. - He said, for all the hipping and hollering that we did about it and asked him not to bring this great big thing in, it was a major payoff. It was a fantastic opportunity for Connor. - You never know. (cover clicks) - And that's it.