'Holy guacamole!' Keeping '70s systems running in 2000

A classic Star Trek plot which seems to pop up in every clone and Trek wannabe series features some creature who is horribly ill. Of course, disease is no problem for 24th century technology -- they just pop in, say, a dilithium-powered spleen, or whatever's needed, and the poor critter's health is restored.

Next thing you know, the kidneys are going, and some doctor is waving a Tricorder over the patient and whipping out a pair of replacements powered by graviton waves.

About 45 minutes into the show, the "guy" has a dilithium spleen, plastic feet, transparent aluminum eyes, a nuclear heart, a positronic brain and wooden teeth. Just as it appears all will be well, there's a warp core breach and a bad accident involving this guy's hair.

The doctor's just about to replace that mousy brown hair with a serious strawberry blonde tachiyon coiffure when suddenly the crew is struck by a thought. As the damage reports roll in, they discuss the implications:

If they replace the last original piece of this guy, will he still be human?

George Sugar knows that feeling.

George and his company, Newspaper Systems Group Inc. of Carlsbad, Calif., support the old Text Management System manufactured by Digital Equipment Corp. The TMS systems were built around the DEC PDP series of mainframe computers.

How old are those PDPs? Well, you know all those pictures of Bill Gates banging away on a Teletype when he actually was 14, rather than just looking 14? There's a PDP on the other end of that Teletype line.

Think that means that the decades-old PDP-based TMS systems will be long gone by the start of the new millennium?

Think again.

Customer demand has prompted Sugar's company to offer a Year 2000 solution for TMS systems. Many legacy systems -- including PDPs -- are unable to deal with dates past 1999. Most saved memory by using a two-digit year scheme under which 00 is 1900, not 2000.

There's no point in a Year 2000 solution unless you intend to keep your TMS running into the 21st century. Sugar says all of his contract customers but one have already signed up for the 2000 fix, plus others.

But wait! There's more!

One of the more likely candidates to wear out on any computer system are the disk drives, which are, after all, mechanical systems with moving parts.

Are you worried your old PDP drives have seen better days? Have no fear -- Newspaper Systems Group has figured out a way to hook brand new Small Computer Systems Interface drives to your old PDPs.

But why stop with SCSI drives? Why have a PDP at all?

Sugar says his company can now replace the PDPs entirely with PCs equipped with PDP emulation boards. As George likes to say, "Holy guacamole!"

No one is more surprised by all this than Sugar himself.

"When Dave Webb and I started this, we thought we'd have two-year life expectancy. That was in '91," Sugar said. "But we're still going strong."

So you'll excuse Sugar if he's gotten out of the prognostication business. While he's not sure when the last TMS will give up the ghost, he's got a pretty good idea why that time won't come until some day in the next millennium.

"We've already addressed (the Year 2000) problem. Indeed, that system was only designed to run through '92; surely no one dreamed they'd be running in 2000," he said. "But we have enough requests. For those folks under contract, it's just an upgrade."

Sugar said it's easy to understand why so many newspapers have chosen to stand pat with their legacy systems.

"One driving force is the economy," he said. "The '90s have been slow growth or no growth in this business. Some papers are reluctant to make changes because of that."

Indeed, the '90s have not been the best of times for newspapers; everyone knows about the financial struggles. To that has been added the uncertainty of migration to a new class of systems. Clearly the day of the big iron systems (think Atex J11) had passed by the early '90s. On the other hand, the new systems replacing them were, until recently, largely untested in full-scale newspaper installations.

So it's hard to blame the newspapers who decided not to decide, and chose rather to squeeze more life out of their existing systems.

One way they've been able to keep old systems is to graft on new pieces that offer cutting edge capabilities, such as digital photography and desktop publishing. Life with a TMS in the 21st Century doesn't look too bad if you have a Local Area Network grafted on to the old beast.

That allows the best of both worlds: You can crank out inside pages on that dependable old TMS while getting as fancy as your designers' hearts desire -- or your style permits -- with XPress, Photoshop and Freehand running on PCs wired to the TMS through the LAN.

Wiring the TMS to a LAN allows a newspaper company to have one seamless system -- copy originates in the usual fashion, is edited, then is routed to one production system or the other.

Sugar's company has built a TeleCommunication Protocol/Internet Protocol interface for the Pdp 11/84s that are the heart of the TMS systems. Once you've got a TCP/IP connection coming out of the PDP, you can hook just about anything to the other end: A Novell NetWare network, Windows NT, UNIX -- any open system that supports TCP/IP is fair game.

"DEC systems really didn't have the ability to get them to connect to other networks," said Sugar. "This gives a newspaper the ability, for example, to use a network with Macs for Quark XPress pagination."

That may not be the most surprising rabbit Newspaper Systems Group has pulled out of its digital hat, though. "We've written PostScript drivers that run on the old DEC system," said Sugar. "It's a huge expense to switch to a new system. Customers are saying, 'Is there a way to migrate?'"

Sugar's company is helping newspapers do that a step at a time, rather than in one frightening leap.

Another driving factor is the sheer dogged reliability of the old PDPs, said Sugar. "We've got a customer that has 140,000 hours on a disk drive unit," he said.

For those without a calculator handy, that means the unit has been running for about 16 years -- nonstop. (The TMS systems were not the only big-iron newspaper installations to use DEC PDPs, by the way; they were also used by Atex, Crosfield (a.k.a. CSI) and others.)

OK, that's all wonderful if you have one of George's trusty PDPs out in the backshop, but what if you don't? What if you have, say, a Hastech?

Well, there are two types of Hastechs, according to Samuel List of Publishing Partners International of Manchester, N.H.: Fairly new ones, and really, really, really old ones.

"A lot of these old sites haven't been upgraded for 10 years," said List. "A lot of the old Hastechs can't be made 2000-compatible without an inordinate investment involving massive hardware and software upgrades. There are only two classes of Hastech products: pretty new and really old."

So while it is technically possible to upgrade these older systems, it may not be worth investing that much in such an old system. On the other hand, List said, the newer systems are no problem.

"The newer ones we can add on to. Even if they have older PDP-11s, they are not expensive to replace.

"The Tecs/2 systems are more compatible," said List, referring to a system originally developed by Morris Newspapers and sold by the old Information International Inc.; it was taken over by Publishing Partners last year. "We have a Year 2000 upgrade ready. Tecs/2 is PC-based, so it is easily upgraded.

"We'll probably do some announcements after the first of the year," List said, to tell customers "whether they are OK if they are, or if they should consider replacing their systems. You don't want to get stuck in June 1999 with a system that can't have a Year 2000 upgrade."

OK, so let's say for the sake of argument that you can keep that old TMS or Hastech running well into the 24th Century, with a positronic brain instead of that old PDP and a couple of those trusty old yellow VT terminals out on the bridge of the Enterprise. Now, leaving aside what Mr. Scott is going to do to you when he catches you -- "Get that bucket a bolts off me ship!" -- there's the minor question of whether this is a good idea.

Just because something is technically possible doesn't mean it is a good idea.

"This is a good time to consider whether to upgrade," said List. "It's different now than it was two years ago. Two years ago, what was there that could paginate as well as an old Hastech? Now there is.

"The biggest Hastech systems were 30 to 40 terminals. There's a lot of product around now for systems that size that really does work. And they're not the kind of money that you paid for the old systems. For example, we have a new advertising system that's pretty attractive. A lot of Hastech sites are putting in our ad system. It's a good changeover at a good price."

In the end, then, you're going to have to look at your business to determine whether it makes more sense to buy a new system, which pairs advantages -- such as relational database technology -- with the risks of new equipment and the costs of retraining.

Or you may decide it makes more sense for you to upgrade your existing legacy system, and live with both its proven reliability and its limitations.

We here at The Cole Papers have this final word of wisdom:

If we ever do get to yell, "Beam us up, Scotty!" we just hope he's not transporting our atoms with a Pdp 11/84.

Newspaper Systems Group Inc.,
(619) 929-2190,
e-mail: 75030.3247@compuserve.com;
Publishing Partners International,
(603) 644-3339,
e-mail: 73301.2652@compuserve.com

-- Christopher J. Feola

From THE COLE PAPERS, January 1997, Copyright © 1997, All Rights Reserved.