Here is another small addition to the list of interesting machines that
may be scrapyard-bound as January 1, 2000 approaches.
Evans & Sutherland have recently sent a letter to the owners of ESV
workstations indicating that these systems will suffer catastrophic
failure (i.e, will refuse to boot) after January 1, 2000 due to a Y2K
problem with the system's NVRAM. The ESV is a quite nice UNIX-based 3D
graphics workstation, and many of these systems are still in use running
specialized software (such as the 'O' molecular modeling package). E&S
indicate that the Y2K problems with the older VAX-tethered graphics
terminals are all in the "nuisance" category, but the warning message is
certain to send many of these machines that remain to the scrapyard, as
well.
SGI also does not certify any of their systems with 68K, R2000, or R3000
processors to be Y2K compliant, presumably because they cannot run IRIX
6.5. Watch your local scrap dealer for IRIS 2000/3000, 4D series, and
Indigo R3000 systems.
--
Scott Ware ware_at_xtal.pharm.nwu.edu
Received on Mon Dec 21 1998 - 18:20:18 GMT