Evans & Sutherland Y2K scrapyard heads-up

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(a)xtal.pharm.nwu.edu