Hello I read the thread about old computers lying around in the office and it got me thinking about an old employer. I used to work as a consultant for Realogic INC when we were bought by Computer Associates. I was now working for a huge company with hundreds of software titles covering the entire world.

I can not speak for all of the offices only the one that I was in. But I was in for the shock of my life when I went into one of the computer closets and lo and behold what kind of dinosaur did mine eyez see.

A fully functional, on the network WANG system. Yes people a WANG from the mid seventies. It still had the screen that was about seven inches across and weighed 100 pounds. OK so it wasn't "Mission Critical" but amazing.

Next I talked to the Office Manager Yesterday when she called me for tech support on her machine. Local support sux. I asked her if anybody had Y2Ked her machine by now? She said nobody had touched her machine at all.

I remember this one machine as having the original release of Win95. Office 97 not patched. This machine is used to put in time and expense reports for all of the consultants who she has. If that is not "Mission Critical" I don't know what is. How long is this division supposed to operate if the consultants don't get paid for their expenses?

Out of morbid curiosity I asked my ex-mother-in-law (i still have good relations with her) what her company has done for Y2K. She works for Old Fashioned Foods Inc. They run several restaurants and have vending machine contracts all over the place.

She told me that they are using the same computer system that they always have. I asked her if this was the same system that I remeber when I last visited back in 1983! She said that it was the same one.

This is a system with "green screens" and keyboards, Giant printer rooms, and a tape backup system that used audio cassettes!! I asked if they had any pc's and she said that they office has an Apple GS2 that belonged to a former employee that was left there.

She just happens to work in the accounting department doing payroll and accounts recievable.

These two companies are not considered "small businesses" that have not gotten around to Y2K yet.

-- dragoneyez (dragoneyez@mindspring.com), September 15, 1999

Answers

Burlington Northern Railroad is still using an old WANG machine in Fort Worth, Texas....

-- STFrancis (STFrancis@heaven.com), September 15, 1999.

Just because it's old it doesn't mean it's doomed!

I can't speak about Wang, but Digital VAXes were engineered to have no hardware problems with the millennium from the first one shipped. (The internal timekeeping is a 64-bit counter ticking 10 million times a second; that's good up to the year 20,000 or thereabouts).

In any case, it's rarely the computer that's the main problem. It's the software that it runs. Any software that stores the year as YY is potential trouble, regardless of how well the underlying hardware keeps track of the date. Conversely, unless a PC is continuously operating (for example process control), many (not all) noncompiant BIOS problems amount simply to the clock wrapping from 1999 to 1900 (or 1980), and a single manual or automated intervention the first time the system is used in 2000 will fix the noncompliancy for the next century ... provided the software is OK.

-- Nigel Arnot (nra@maxwell.ph.kcl.ac.uk), September 16, 1999.

St. Francis:

I don't know anything about the Wang machine used at Burlington, but I DO know that their mainframe work was moved to a NEW separate mainframe for time-machine testing. That information, BTW, is about 7 months old now. Please look at the entire picture before you make assumptions about Burlington.

-- Anita (spoonera@msn.com), September 16, 1999.

It would seem appropriate to post responses to existing threads within those threads rather than needlessly starting new threads.

Jerry

-- Jerry B (skeptic76@erols.com), September 16, 1999.