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January 1, 2020 – On January1, a friend was posting about what he was doing 20 years ago today. Hewas on duty and close to work, ready for the great Y2K meltdown—ameltdown that did not occur in part because of a lot of work done inadvance…
Early that morning, 20 years ago, I wasstanding on a one-lane bridge on a country road at midnight, watchingneighbors shoot off fireworks to greet the new century. My phone, notyet a smart phone, was in my pocket, waiting for phone calls from thecampus Power Plant and the Electric Distribution group reporting anyissues. If I did not get those calls, I planned to call in, as theconsultants had warned that the phone switches might fail aftermidnight as well. I was on that country road so I could be on site infifteen minutes if any of the phone calls were not good.
At the time, I had the integration ofdistribution systems for steam and for chilled water in my wheelhouseas well. I felt good, having spent four years remediating system issuesfrom low-level BIOS to inter-system communications. The University didnot yet provide complete networking services so that work includedpatches to routers and switches as well. The parallel work to patch theline-of-business client-server systems had been relatively painless.
My largest issue involved theintegration of a hundred buildings with advanced control systems,mostly for energy management. After the oil-price shock of 1973, a fewdozen of the most critical high-energy-consuming buildings had beenmigrated to a single centralized energy management system—one that wasstill based on RSX running on an ageing PDP-11. Since then, each newbuilding was equipped with digital controls, purchased from andinstalled by the lowest bidder in accord with State Construction law.To make matters ..
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