Tenuous Link

I have almost 20 years of experience working with the Model 204 Database Management System, aka M204. It's strengths are extreme flexibility coupled with excellent security features and blazing speed when working with massive databases. Here's a link to a recent press release about the product, and below an email I got:

Dear Model 204 User,

I wanted to draw your attention to a new press release posted on our Web site. Centrelink of Australia, one of the world's largest users of Model 204, has just signed an agreement with CCA allowing them to use Model 204 throughout their enterprise for at least the next ten years; that is at least until the year 2014. This is very exciting news not only to all of us here at CCA, but to the entire Model 204 customer base. It means that after 20 years of use at Centrelink, Model 204 continues to be the best product on the market to meet their ever-changing and ever-growing needs -- needs which are very likely similar to your own.

Centrelink originally chose Model 204 back in 1983 because it was the only product that could meet their performance and capacity requirements. Since that time their requirements have grown dramatically. What started out as a traditional database system with just a few thousand online users now services over 24,000 internal users and over 6 million customers over the Internet and Interactive Voice Response systems. They now run the fourth largest information and technology network in Australia and are still growing. With Model 204, they have been able to meet every new challenge, while integrating new technologies as they come to market.

This is the kind of application that would make Oracle do the 'dead bug'.

The tenuous link is that the company I work for had the original contract to optimize the Australian databases, way back in the 1980's. When I first hired on, I was hoping to be assigned to that contract.

Computer-wise, newer is not always better.