🚀 go-pugleaf

Responses to my initial query about Y2K compliance issues for the
DECstation platform only trickled in slowly, and largely concerned the
issues related to the operating system being used, Ultrix.  There were
virtually no specific responses about the hardware itself, save one
brief discussion of clock chip issues for the DECstation 5000.  There
were no responses at all describing the DECstation 3100 system.

As is made clear at Compaq's Y2K website, there is a kit to make later
versions of Ultrix Y2K compliant.  Documents describing this are listed
at:     www.compaq.com/year2000/software.html

As one respondee noted, the existance of the Ultrix Y2K compliance
program strongly, but only implicitly indicates that the hardware
running this OS is likely Y2K compliant itself.  Only DEC (Compaq) can
explain, however, why there is no mention of this platform anywhere on
their Y2K web site.

One respondee noted that there apparently were explicit statements by
DEC in web pages in 1998 about DECstation Y2K compliance, but that
these pages have since disappeared.

One respondee, bless him, forwarded his entire collection of postings
to this list from back in 1997, and yet, nothing was contained therein
about the DECstation hardware, other than the aforementioned clock chip
issues.

The clock chip issue concerns the apparently known fact that the clock
chip on DECstation 5000's cannot handle the year 2000 properly.  This
is dealt with by ignoring the chip's year field, and just using the
chip to adjust time values based on initial values stored elsewhere.
Since I am about the fourth level down in the hierarchy of this
tidbit's relaying, I would attribute only modest confidence to what
I've described, due to the inevitable vagueness that occurs when
information gets passed along this way.

It's clear that what I offer in summary is of only modest usefulness,
made so by the largely vague and uncertain responses that I received,
and by my equally vague summarizing.  I'm not even going to cite
specific respondees by name, since most of their responses were
qualified by remarks about the accuracy of recollection, etc., and that
there just really wasn't much hard, fast information to be had.

Still, there is something being conveyed by all this ambiguity and
doubt.  Can you say, "Time to upgrade hardware..."?

I knew you could...

Thanks to everyone who replied.