Posted on 06/08/2006 2:24:39 PM PDT by 2Jim_Brown
Remember the Y2K panic back in 1999? That was the largely unfounded and shamelessly hyped by rapaciously greedy computer companies fear that all computers would cease functioning on Jan. 1, 2000, at midnight, due to somewhat inept programming and planning back in the early days of the digital age. Never happened. But what did happen was that corporations all over the globe stocked up on computers. Lots of computers. Servers. PCs. Workstations. You name it. They wanted to be ready for the big breakdown at the millennium. Then, the computer business stalled for a few years. Now, sources are telling United Press International's Networking column, that all that computer hardware is finally being put to good use, as IT departments add virtualization software from EMC Corp., Sun, IBM and others that lets those underutilized servers be put to work. By Gene Koprowski hitech@upi.com
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
You said -- "Coproations are now putting to good use the computers they bought due to the Y2K panic."
I remember that my Macintosh didn't have to worry about the Y2K issue, since it was a different operating system and didn't have that date rollover problem.
At least I knew that I would have my computer working -- for a few hours, anyway -- until the electrical grid went down... :-)
Regards,
Star Traveler
Might be true in few companys but in general any manchine bought in Y2K is very obsolete.
Doe'nt mean they're not still running but anybody who thinks corporate america has'nt been buying lots of machines over the last 5+ years has'nt been paying attention.
Somebody powerfull wants to dump some stock and got a story written.
Wow where to start with this article. First elements of the Y2K scare were legit, not the panic that the world was going to shut down that was silly, but the announcement that quite large amount of then current software and computer systems needed to be either replaced ot fixed to avoid problems was legit.
Second it wasn't rapaciously greedy computer companies that were pushing it, if there was anybody rapacious and greedy pushing it that would be the disaster people getting people to buy generators and canned foods in case society as a whole stopped. The computer companies (and really mostly software companies) were pushing legitimate fixes to a legitimate problem.
Third corporations weren't buying all these computers (and software, really software got the biggest push not hardware) to be ready for the big breakdown of the milenium, they were buying it to AVOID the big breakdown. Those purchases are why there wasn't a breakdown. Now in hardware there tended to be upgrades that might have given the companies more computing power than they needed, but that's what happens when you replace a 20 year older server farm that can't handle Y2K with a new server farm that can, you're going to get a 20 year jump in computing power.
BS.
I've worked in the industry for almost 15 years and I can say with absolute certanty that the Y2K "scare" was far from simply a scare. The reason why nothing happened is precicely because these "greedy, bad, capitalists" had everyone upgrade. If nothing was done it very well could've been a disaster. Not "your microwave won't work" disasterous, but quite possibly large amounts of financial data would've been gone forever.
Needless to say, I stopped reading shortly after that phrase. The author loses all credibility from that point on.
Amen. The company bought me a laptop in 2000. By the end of 2004 it had to be replaced, because it was too dog slow to run modern software.
The only computers bought in Y2K that are still in use are doing work as doorstops.
Bologna. The computers that were purchased in Y2K are fully depreciated, six years old, off maintenance, off warranty, too slow and small to run 2K6 software. Companies don't put boat anchors to work running strategic apps. A goober wrote this article.
I'm cleaning the kids' closets (engineers, left long ago) and have boxes of programs and programming language packs, discs, cable, computer parts, chips, electronics, a CRT of all things, bits and pieces of frames they used to build computers, and
all of it is obsolete and will get get pitched or recycled.
(and yes, I did ask them. I still hear about my mother pitching my brother's baseball trading cards...)
That's a complete load of crap. Any computers bought almost 7 years ago are obsolete for any high speed applications and will be replaced now or in the near future.
Old machines sometimes run on past their apparent obsolesence as the cost of replacing them is generally much greater then the cost of the machine. In other words 'If it ain't broke...'
But there are few machines left running from Y2K. (except in Sun shops, where the machines are no faster then they were in Y2K).
What as doorstops?
You must not be in IT or know anything about IT.
Corporations that are virtualizing are buying brand new, uber-powerful hardware systems and running multiple instances of operating systems on these servers.
The systems purchased from 1997-1999 are very, very, very obsolete right now and can barely run Windows 2000, which is nearing end of support from Microsoft.
You could probably sell some of that stuff on ebay in the "vintage computer" section.
Yeah, a 1999 computer will put any business on the fast track.... to no where.
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