Marc; At the current rate of obsolescence in the Wintel universe there will be few machines still operating with the old embedded clock chips susceptable to that problem. About 25% goes down into the scrap heap every year(by motherboard exchange or destruction , both eliminate the old motherboards, I change motherboards every 6 months or so in my fanatic machine, even so I still have a 486 in addition to my Pentiums still running, and that 486 pases the Y2000 test as well. The legacy of tight code written for the old mainframes bach when you only had 16K is the problem. They made incremental upgrades to hard drives, memory, CPU etc over the years, but never wanted to buy new software as the faster hardware papered over the problems with the old software. In addition the lack of bloat made the updated old machines extremely fast, as they ran the little 16K?? programs. Some of them would run 1000's of networked terminals in text mode at an acceptable rate. Ever make an airline reservation and watch the agents terminal, all ascii, capable of great speed, no GUI at all, and all over a serial line and modem.
Bill |
