Year 2000 Bounty

From: William Donzelli <william_at_ans.net>
Date: Thu Apr 23 23:39:55 1998

> Think of all the companies who are right now weighing whether or not those
> old mainframes that have been chugging away in their data centers for
> years, perhaps even decades, are worth one more upgrade to support 4-digit
> years or whether it would make more sense to finally take the painful
> route of scrapping their old iron and moving on to PCs or AS400s or
> whatnot. I predict a tremendous flood of old mainframe and mini hardware
> coming to market like so many cattle which will only peak on December 31,
> 1999.

I do not think we are going to see a huge influx of oldiron at the
scrapyards come the turn of the century. It has been happening steadily
for the past five years or so. The mainframe world tends to be
similar to the consumer desktop word, with the old S/360 standard being
the dominant force and the Unisys standards being a distant second (like
the Macintosh). Both of these companies foresaw the Y2K problem and came
out with new machines and operating systems, and they have been selling
lot of them (well, IBM and company anyway - Unisys seems to be fading).
The hardware Y2K problem, for the most part, has been solved. But that was
the easy bit...
 
> This is a once in a millennium opportunity! So make sure you've got
> plenty of space and plenty of petty cash to throw around cuz its gonna be
> easy pickins.

It has always been easy pickins. Just last week I dragged home a bunch of
cards from 3880 storage directors, as well as cards from some early S/370
tape drives. The boxes themselves were too big to deal with (I was 800
miles from home on a business trip, and just had to take a little time to
go to a junkyard).

William Donzelli
william_at_ans.net
Received on Thu Apr 23 1998 - 23:39:55 BST