teaching young IT certed person about old minis/mainframes

I'm not working with minis or mainframes now but I did once. Some time after, I had an interesting conversation with a young buck. His facination was virtualisation products such as VMWare. He was surprised and very interested to hear of VM/370 and what it was capable of decades earlier and even more surprised to hear that its descendant is in use now for bang up to date applications yet he had not come across it. Minis and mainframes might be regarded by someone with a 1GB mobile phone as obsolete/slow/difficult/irrelevant/restrictive/clunky or whatever but if you can relate them to something they are interested in their attitudes can change quickly. Another angle is to appeal to their hacker instinct. Tell them about system security. Get them to test it. I'll bet that having someone take a fresh approach will turn up security holes that nobody knew about as well as getting them to teach themselves about the system. A bit of guidance is required of course to avoid them doing actual damage if they should stumble into something lacking the appropriate protection. Regards, Peter Coghlan.