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This article in SUN WORLD - COMPUTING (May 1997) is remarkable. It talks about Java, a language used on the World Wide Web. (Hardly anyone uses it today.) This will be very big, we are told.
There will also be significant progresss in network computing.
It reports on Unix servers. This will be big, too. (Sun is a competitor of Microsoft, which is pushing for its own NT system over Unix.)
Finally, it gets to mainframes and the Year 2000 Problem. (No mention so far of y2k problems with microcomputers.) It cites Gartner Group's Mike O'Connell:
"Our estimate is that 70 percent of the applications will fail in one form or another. And 30 percent of these mission critical applications will fail. We are projecting that 10 percent of organizations will actually go out of business as a result."
I have this nagging question: What if the 10% includes all banks, the electrical power companies, and every government above the county level?
What does Sun conclude from all this? That it will be a bright day for network systems. "Looking to the year 2000 there are two fundamentally new opportunities -- automating the communication between the company and its customers, and automating the relationship between the company and its supply chain and business partners."
Anything else? Nothing big. "Internet standards and Java aim to solve the communication and platform compatibility issues."
That's it? Well, there is the question of Web bandwidth "to support applications like 3D graphics and video conferencing. . . ."
If you were expecting a dose of reality from the PC world, forget it.
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