Flashback to the mid-1990s, when this big electricity generation and distribution organization is still using green-screen terminals and a 32-bit VAX minicomputer for a key system, according to a pilot fish there.

“Users would navigate through the text menus to their chosen report, hit Enter and submit it to batch,” fish says. “They would then wait for up to ten minutes before a notification would appear at the bottom of the screen that their report was ready to view or print.”

To reduce that delay, the organization upgrades to a 64-bit Alpha server. All the tests of the new system work flawlessly, and it goes live.

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