On July 28, Lord Isildur wrote:
> I wonder how long it will last. Blockbuster is still all-dec as well, 
> they must have tens of thousand of VT[34]20s in service nationwide, and 
> there have to be hundreds of VAXen hidden somewhere too.. i notice many 
> local businesses still have DEC gear, and its still ticking. however, the 
> end is coming down the road... vax 4000's are starting to show up on ePay 
> with greater frequency, and those terminals and stuff only have a few 
> more years to go before they start getting flaky.. 

  If the lifespans of VT100s and VT220s are any indicator at all, there
should be quite a few good years left.  Though I'm saying this a few
days after I had a VT320 die... :-(

> In the ( i think most recent) issue of military &aerospace electronics 
> there was an article about some component testing system the navy uses... 
> there were some photographs, and one caught my eye because something 
> hashed to 'dec gear' in there.. i looked again, and saw an LK201 on some 
> big testing station.. i looked closer and the thing had a VRE01 on it 
> too! way cool! then i read the article, and they make the hint that 
> there's a lot of VAX stuff still in use in the military world.. (as well 
> it should! the stuff lasts approximately forever!) 

  There is.  At the DoD contractor where I worked in about ten years
ago, there were a number of MicroVAX-II systems with KDA50s and RA60s
installed in a secure environment.  Since it's a lot easer (or at
least it was at the time) to get a cleared vendor service tech in
there to maintain it that it would be to get a replacement system
cleared, they tend to keep them around.  That environment is mostly
immune to the "there's something newer available therefore this one
has magically stopped doing its job" attitude.

  At least two of them were still there as of about a year ago, and
strangely enough, it was still processing data. :-)

       -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire                  "Needing a calculator indicates that
St. Petersburg, FL              your .emacs file is incomplete." -Joshua Boyd