Lawrence has provided a copy of his slides (ODF or PPT).

Many of us have experienced the nightmare of having to migrate data from one platform to another or to convert an entire company away from a particular antiquated software or operating system. Now, we will take a closer look at one such painful ordeal by focusing on the complexities of moving away from a particular business language that is no longer supported.

At the September meeting of UUASC-OC, our own Lawrence Leavell, who last spoke to us more than eight years ago, returns to discuss everything that is involved in converting systems running an obsolete language family called Business Basic.

Lawrence will cover the discovery process, selection of equipment, defining backup and recovery procedures, migration of software between closely related languages, the testing of the ported application, fully reproducing the customer's environment, and enhancing the customer's operating environment.

Lawrence has performed such conversions for more than 20 years, many of which involved moving customers over to Linux platforms. He has seen numerous systems as much as 20 years old still serving companies on what was essentially their original hardware. However, the operating system and the language interpretor are no longer supported, many even out of existence. So, when the company determines they need to upgrade, they often have little choice but to migrate to newer languages and equipment.