PRIMOS® and the Year 2000

Document outline

• Overview
• The Issue
• Year 2000 Solutions
• Applications issues
• What is supported by the toolkit
• Price and warranty
• Other products (Prime/Information®, Henco INFO, etc.)
• What about Computronics Software Products?
• How to get the toolkit
• What will happen if I do nothing?

PRIMOS and The Year 2000 Overview

The Issue:

The answer: With your current revision of PRIMOS, as it stands, no. But there's a solution!

The good news: Computronics has put together a "Year 2000 tool kit" of utilities and patches that will enable a wide variety of PRIMOS revisions to work properly in the year 2000 time period. We have been studying this matter for months and have found the issues and come up with ways to work around them. So you _won't_ need to pull the plug on the Prime when the date rolls over to 2000. More on this later...

What will happen if you do nothing at all? Two sets of problems come up. First of all, most versions of PRIMOS will roll the date over from 31 December 1999 to 01 January 2000 properly. Some older versions roll over to a date of "01/01/00", which is right, but some utilities display this date wrong, perhaps as a date like "January 1, 19100". But this is not true in all utilities nor in as many places in more recent versions of PRIMOS. Such problems vary a great deal by revision.

Then a number of things start to break. The spooler prints incorrect dates, as do various other utilities. DSM stops working. The second issue, which can be even more serious, is that the VCP clock information is not sent properly to the system when booting, and virtually all version of PRIMOS will take a VCP date of "01/01/00" and set the date in PRIMOS itself to "01/01/28". This will happen again on each reboot. So even with a properly set VCP clock, the PRIMOS date will be wrong.

Year 2000 Solutions:

Perhaps they are running applications that were never migrated or tested at later releases of PRIMOS. In some cases, the applications or other subsystems were written by companies that are out of business or individuals that are no longer available. Some sites have smaller systems and don't want to run a later version of PRIMOS due to the performance impact on their system. In add- ition to these reasons, some sites that are already on release 23.4 or 24.0 do not have the resources to deal with a PRIMOS change; the people who "knew the Prime" just aren't around any more. (Or if they are still around, their memory isn't what it used to be ;-)

So, what is the alternative? Computronics is pleased to announce the "Year 2000 Toolkit for Prime Systems". This is a set of libraries and patches that will resolve or work around the problems that have been found in various revisions of PRIMOS. These patches will solve the bulk of the problems, including serious ones such as the VCP clock problem mentioned above. It does this by actually patching your current version of PRIMOS, so you are not upgrading PRIMOS! Fixes are even available for older programs, such as the pre-revision 21 spooler!

Application Issues:

The Computronics toolkit can help with testing your applications! The toolkit includes a mode that you can set for selected users to enable them to execute programs with a different date than the system date. Thus from that user's point of view the date is now a new date that you specify.

For your testing purposes, keep in mind that there are a number of considerations in doing this on a production system, as you will have other programs using the correct date, and so potentially you will have mixed dates in files. Thus the testing can itself cause problems in some applications; just make sure you are using test files and copies of databases before undergoing such tests. (This is a concern for anyone performing year 2000 testing, on any system).

What is Supported by the Toolkit?:

Will _everything_ be fixed? Again, you will need to deal with application issues. Also, the toolkit is designed to fix the bigger problems, and not every possible issue, particularly at older versions of PRIMOS. The problems that are not addressed will be of a cosmetic nature, in the way some utilities display dates. They will not be issues that impact the system in a serious way.

Can I try the Toolkit? Sure! You don't have to take Computronics word that it works. Computronics will offer a single 30 day trial to any prospective customer. The 30 days begins when you install the toolkit. This will enable you to give it a test drive in advance of the magic 1 January 2000 date so that you can see how it works for yourself!

And remember, no hardware changes, no new PRIMOS revisions to install, no "Hardware Audit" to be done!

Price and Warranty:

Is there a warranty?

Computronics warrants that the Year 2000 Toolkit will fix the PRIMOS related date issues, and also Computronics will work with you to resolve anything that might have been missed. But Computronics can't guarantee that every last problem in every last routine has been fixed. And so the warranty for the Toolkit is limited to Computronics fixing any problems with the Toolkit or you will get your money back. No consequential damages and all of that stuff; you know the fine print... And, once again, YOU will need to look at any year 2000 impacts in your applications.

Installation help? Maintenance of your Prime hardware?

Computronics will provide unlimited telephone support for the Toolkit. Just call with questions or if you want somone to "talk you through" the installation.

Prime/Information® Issues:

Computronics has heard from several customers that Ardent is telling users that they _must_ upgrade PRIMOS for the Year 2000. This is simply not true. Ardent is merely saying this because of a joint marketing arrangement between CVSI and Ardent. In fact, Ardent knows that it is not true, since Computronics had already discussed the Year 2000 Toolkit with Ardent back in February 1998.

So please get the facts: Computronics is happy to offer a free trial of the Toolkit! Plus the Toolkit provides a way for you to run tests by varying the date for selected users in a test mode; this is something you can't do with PRIMOS, of course. And CVSI is not offering you a free trial. So we are not asking you to take our word for it; we're giving you a chance to try it out.

By the way, if you have source code for all of your Prime/Information programs, you will not need the Prime/Information upgrade from Ardent at all. A simple change to your programs will resolve the Year 2000 problems. Note again that this _only_ applies if you have source code to your programs to make this simple change. Contact Computronics for details, if this is your situation.

Other Products:

What about other programs and products? Computronics is not in a position to test every piece of software out there, and certainly not your applications. But consulting services are available to run tests with you, to run tests on Computronics' system, or just to work with you as this critical year 2000 time approaches.

What about Computronics Software Products?:

Since 1993 Computronics has developed many Unix products, such as Peek for Unix and ZIP for Unix. All Computronics utilities mentioned in this section are year 2000 compliant. If you are under maintenance for these products, new year 2000 compatible releases are avail- able for these products at no charge. If you are not under maintenance, appropriate releases will be available at special prices. Call Computronics for details.

As so many of the Prime users have new personnel that may not be real familiar with the software on their systems, below is a list of all Computronics product names so that you can determine if you are running any of these products: PEEK, AMLC Status, CPL To Shell Convertor, Log-Time, Login Security Trail, Network, Password Expiration, PrintMaster, Remote Print Handler, SoftWire, Status Line Message, Usage Accounting, ZIP, Printer Drivers for HP Laserjet and others, LPR, LPD, SNA, DPTX, and FORMS terminal drivers... If you believe you may be running any of these products, contact the people at Computronics for details about Year 2000 versions of the products.

What will happen if I do nothing?

Shut down all the way to the "CP1>" prompt.

Reset the date via the "setime" command at this prompt. Here is a command to use:
se -010100 -09001

This will set the date to 01 January 2000 and 9:00am. Use the exact command, including the "1" at the end of the time.

Now, boot the system using "bootp" or "boot 14114".

When the system comes up, what date is shown as processes login? Is it 01 Jan 28? If so, this is a bug that is fixed by the Toolkit.

Try the date command, particularly "date -cal". Does it show "January 1, 2000"? If not, this is fixed by the Toolkit.

Try an LD command with a date, for example "ld -after 1/1/2000". If the system doesn't accept this command, you need a fix. This same problem also affects other programs. Do you have any CPL programs that use dates? Those will also fail without the Toolkit.

Try printing with the spooler that you use. Does it print properly? Is the banner page and dates formatted right? These issues are also fixed with the Toolkit.

These are just some of the major issues corrected by the Toolkit. There are many other smaller problems that are fixed. In addition, a very popular feature is that the Toolkit lets you alter the date for selected users. Thus you can leave the system date alone and tell the Toolkit to set a date of 01 Jan 2000 or perhaps 29 Feb 2000 for a selected user, and then that user can run programs and test Y2K compliance of your applications. This has been a very popular feature.

Finally, don't forget that the Toolkit installs completely in under 1/2 an hour, and that includes loading the tape and reading the manual. Think of how long a PRIMOS upgrade takes, even if it is a late revision of PRIMOS.

Ask Computronics if you have specific questions about your revision of PRIMOS.

How to Get The Toolkit:

Computronics
4N165 Wood Dale Road
Addison, Illinois 60101 USA

• Phone: 630/941-7767
• Fax: 630/941-7714
• Sales: info@computronics.com
• Support: support@computronics.com

updated 1998-March-23, 1998-July-31, 1998-August-21, 1998-December-17 and 1999-October-10.

Copyright © 1999 Computronics. All rights reserved.

Peek ® is a trademark of Computronics. Prime®, PRIMOS®, and Prime 50 Series (tm) are trademarks of CVSI, Inc. All other brand and product names contained here are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

 
                       PRIMOS Revision
 
CPU Model     20.2/21.0/22.0     22.1       23.2/23.3/23.4/24.0
---------     --------------     ----       -------------------
2xxx,4050         $2000          $2000            $1500
 
4150,4450,
5310,5320,
9xxx              $4000          $3500            $3000
 
5340,5370,
6xxx              $5000          $4500            $4000