[Milsurplus] old software

[Ray Fantini]

The big software upgrade. For years at the university we used Dec Vax
software, the hardware is always improving but the same old software
with improvements has been around from the beginning of time.  People
often don't realize the incredible amount of software that was written
twenty or thirty years ago that is still running today.
Now our friends at Microsoft will save us from the terrine of old but
working software, PeopleSoft is the future. Microsoft's  new software
is a web base environment  that is touted to replace much if not all of
the old Vax, Unix , APL ( anyone remember that?) and other  database and
information management software. All you need is an almost unlimited
supply of money, to pay to upgrade all your servers and workstations and
more money to pay the People Soft consultants to write the temples and
merge your "legacy" files, along with telling you that all your
hardware that you just bought is too old and everything will be fixed in
the next revision. So I think it's only a matter of time until
Microsoft comes and saves the government with a massive, expensive
Peoplesoft implementation. Then maybe you will miss those old text based
systems.
Ray Fantini KA3EKH