Rebirth of a legacy system

If The Oregonian were a trashy tabloid telling its readers the inside story about the Year 2000, the headline would scream, "Big Iron Lives!"

Faced with the need to replace or upgrade its venerable CSI classified front-end, which was installed in 1980 and last upgraded in 1984, the Portland newspaper went shopping for a new system.

The shoppers returned empty-handed.

"We were asked to look at papers our size or bigger to determine if there's a fit in a classified system that met our criteria and would do everything our system did," said Carol Howard, director of computer services for the Advance Publications property. While her team saw systems that were "really nice," none was scaled to a size acceptable to The Oregonian, and none had the "feature-rich" applications found on its legacy system.

In addition, "no one could guarantee us the response times that we currently have," Howard said. Touring the marketplace was instructive -- "classified systems have progressed from an ad-taking tool to what people want as a sales tool" -- but in the end, staying with a system whose roots were planted during the first Reagan campaign was deemed the thing to do.

So, in a process akin to unscrewing the radiator cap and driving a new car underneath, The Oregonian contracted with the Loki Group of Chicago to make its CSI system ready for 2000.

Now it is.

"We went live Nov. 9 with our solution at The Oregonian," said David Rose, Loki Group president. "We probably knew six weeks earlier that it was going to work."

Rose cited two reasons he's still able to serve the remaining two dozen CSI sites. First, he and a good chunk of his staff did system engineering work for CSI, giving the Loki Group "a hand-picked cadre of what I consider to be my superstars," he said.

Second, "the CSI software policy was that they shipped source code -- every customer owns the software on-site" in terms of CSI applications. The operating system was closely held, but Rose's clients buy "a new operating system that is already Year 2000-compliant that was originally sold by DEC," he said.

"We take copies of that and we upgrade the operating system, then we go through his application suite and we upgrade everything in that," Rose said. Old CSI mainframe hardware is phased out over a two-month period and the result is a system ready to run three to five years more.

Encouraged by his successful surgery on the heart of old CSI systems -- "people were waiting to see if we could actually do this" -- Rose now is poised to undertake creation of a new workstation for CSI sites.

"I'm hoping that we'll do this terminal replacement project and two or three years down the line, the Loki Group will be selling front-end systems. I think the industry needs a few more vendors."

While Rose said he "had been arguing since 1989 that I could do this, that I could gradually upgrade a system," extending the life of CSI systems "wasn't an outcome that anyone anticipated at all -- even me."

-- P.W.

See also Millennium Bug may succumb to aggressive industry attack

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