1999 throwback - the Millennium Bug

[darael]

The more things change, the more the stay the same...

You've been looking at my signature, haven't you?

 

[OspreyO]

I've actually sigs turned off, but if it's true, it's true.

 

[Nasher]

I'm not sure if it's so much that the parts were so much better (I'm sure people will be remembering some of the old computers and the fun you had with them*...), but a lot of them were much more simple and easy to maintain.

Things like CPU's that at most needed a heatsink the size of an old 50p so you had no chance of a failure due to overheating when a fan bearing fails after 3 years of continuous use (or less in a lot of manufacturing environments), and interface cards that might have been fully custom but because they were built to work on an ISA bus using off the shelf parts (except maybe a bit of firmware on a common EEPROM that could be copied off, or replaced if the company kept the file) you could actually pay a specialist company (or even a good hobbyist) to make you up a replacement interface card if need be with them looking at the failed one and reverse engineering it because they could actually see and trace the connections.

One of the problems with wanting more and more performance is that it does come at a cost of far more things that can go wrong, and when they do you're less likely to be able to fix it in a workshop or with normal off the shelf parts.

I watch a few youtube channels of people who restore old machines and it's fun watching them work through issues and in some cases rebuild failed boards, but part of the reason they can usually do that is that if a part fails it's often something they can actually replace with a stock part or it was a bit that was available to the likes of field techs, and the process of replacing it involves maybe a 2 or 4 layer PCB not a 16 layer one (which also means if the board is cracked due to say poor handling or decades of thermal stresses you can potentially bridge the crack to repair the board as opposed to it being junk).


*Poor quality solder joints and design choices made by companies that relied on the fact their customers could do the final QC/build checks at home or bodge up fixes involving blue tack and dropping the machine from a few inches onto a desk...

We did go through a period of bad (and slightly lethal) capacitors since then which caused loads of failures. These old machines lived through that without being replaced.

Apparently happened due to someone in Japan stealing plans and selling them to China, who then manufacturered them incorrectly well in to the 00s, until everyone switched back to Japanese ones lol. Probably isn't the last time that happened.

 

[Werewolf]

I remember that...

I had an Abit KA7 that had that issue...
I think it also affected the Dell 2001FPW's although that might have just been that Dell went with 70c capacitors when they should have gone with the marginally more expensive 95c versions.

 

[Nasher]

I remember that...

I had an Abit KA7 that had that issue...
I think it also affected the Dell 2001FPW's although that might have just been that Dell went with 70c capacitors when they should have gone with the marginally more expensive 95c versions.

Around 2000ish we had a PSU capacitor go pop and go through the build room ceiling like a bullet.

 

[OspreyO]

I'm amazed at those guys who re cap old motherboards and such.

I'd love some of those old machines, but I don't have the space and I'm trying to declutter not increase my hoarding.

The millennium bug was really a non event for me. I'm not seeing many people here being much effected either. Granted it might have all been fixed in the background.

 

[dowie]

So December 31st 1999.

I was the manager of a high end private hire car firm in central London that only did account work at the time for the likes of JP Morgan / Chase Manhatton Bank , ABN , Lehman Brothers , Bank of America , Godman Sachs and UBS - We did work for all of these banks that night transferring in and out I.T workers.

If I remember correctly we were charging 3x standard rates and 2 of the banks each had 10 cars on standby in their basement at £500 car. All the I.T guts we drove all said they were being paid ridiculously for 48 hours and they all had absolutely zero issues, I'm sure most of the leg work was done prior to that anyway.

I was a teenager getting drunk with my mates on NYE but I did later work in finance and after that in financial technology and there were older guys who had been around back then. Ironically the pay just hasn't shifted much at all in that sector (the tech part that is) - it is funny how much pay has stagnated. The sort of amounts people would have talked about back then would still be considered very good amounts today not accounting for inflation even though they've actually been inflated away significantly!

It always amuses me to see things like that, usually the story behind it is either they simply don't need anything better, or quite commonly they'll have some equipment hooked up to those ancient machines that uses a custom interface and replacing the computer might mean replacing several million dollars of associated equipment or recreating some software that there isn't something as easy/good to replace it off the shelf

You might like this then - I'm not sure if it's still the case but certainly, into the 2010s, there was a warning system monitoring some critical infrastructure for some of the biggest banks in the world that ran on an old windows PC - it may have been XP but I'm pretty sure it was older - like 98, 95 or NT era!

 

[Werewolf]

Around 2000ish we had a PSU capacitor go pop and go through the build room ceiling like a bullet.

Qtek?

I'll be honest the big caps in PSU's always scare me a little, and I still laugh at the the bit of the ATX specification that states (i'm paraphrasing a bit) that "PSU failures should be contained and not alarming to the end user", especially as I've had a couple go pop on me (the Antec PSU in my first Sonata case went pop and let out the magic smoke).

You might like this then - I'm not sure if it's still the case but certainly, into the 2010s, there was a warning system monitoring some critical infrastructure for some of the biggest banks in the world that ran on an old windows PC - it may have been XP but I'm pretty sure it was older - like 98, 95 or NT era!

I can quite believe it.

IIRC many of the banks are/were using software originally written in the 70's for some systems (now running on emulated hardware that means it's running many thousands/millions of times faster), and some of the "high security" interbank stuff was running on terminals based on 80's technology.
From memory the cost of compliance testing and the risks of a replacement falling over causing issues means the banks tend to be very very slow to replace software unless they have to, especially for systems that have no "public" connections.

 

[Nasher]

I was a teenager getting drunk with my mates on NYE but I did later work in finance and after that in financial technology and there were older guys who had been around back then. Ironically the pay just hasn't shifted much at all in that sector (the tech part that is) - it is funny how much pay has stagnated. The sort of amounts people would have talked about back then would still be considered very good amounts today not accounting for inflation even though they've actually been inflated away significantly!



You might like this then - I'm not sure if it's still the case but certainly, into the 2010s, there was a warning system monitoring some critical infrastructure for some of the biggest banks in the world that ran on an old windows PC - it may have been XP but I'm pretty sure it was older - like 98, 95 or NT era!

I think I was actually earning the equivalent of higher wages in the mid 00s than I am now :/

Wages just haven't kept up. You now also have to be more ruthless about ditching an employer to go to a higher paying one.