Data Center

New worlds can start before Bitcoin - in 1999, for example - and run a hosting business through the dotcom years. Existing worlds are not touched: every world that already ran keeps its start of 2008-12-31, and a world on 2008-12-31 has the same Shop, prices, rents, News, starter kit and Software Lab as in 1.9.1. Everything below only happens in worlds that start before 2008-12-31.

Update: this version adds blocks and items. Update the server, every client and the modpack at the same time - a client without this version cannot join a server that has it.

Choosing the start

• New config calendar.startDateForNewWorlds (YYYY-MM-DD, 1998-08-24 to 2008-12-31, default 2008-12-31). It is read once, when a world first runs, and stored with the world (data/datacenter_calendar.dat); changing it later never moves a world. 1998-08-24 is the day the first processors of the catalogue (and of the starter kit) came out.
• With Tycoon Calendar its start rules, as before (e.g. calendar.fixedStartDate = "1999-01-01"). Data Center keeps a copy, so the date survives removing the calendar, and warns in the log if the two disagree. A calendar start before 1998-08-24 works, but the Shop has no processor until then; the log says so.
• Before 2009-01-03 there is no Bitcoin: no price, no difficulty and no mining until the real first block. The Mining Rig and the Trading Terminal go on sale on 2008-12-31. Hosting, compute, power and the Software Lab run from the first day.
• No News flood: nothing that happened before a world's first day is news.
• Starter kit of the day: two budget servers of their time (1999: Celeron 333 on a Slot 1 board with a 250 W supply and 32 MB SDRAM; later Celeron 700, Duron 1000, Athlon 64) and no Mining Rig. Before 2001 a Server Cabinet instead of the Hosting Rack.
• Default server system of the day: a new machine runs Linux 2.0, 2.2 or 2.4 - whichever was current - until Linux 2.6 comes out (2003-12-17). Machines that already exist keep their system.

The hardware of 1998-2008

• 98 processors and 21 mainboards, real models under the mod's brands (Flint Ridge / Flint Forge, AMP Piston / AMP Threadwhip, Vertex Core / Vertex Dual): Pentium II/III/4, Pentium D, Celeron, Core 2, K6-2, Athlon, Duron, Athlon XP/64/X2, Sempron, Phenom, and the Xeons, Athlon MP and Opterons of the time - at least one new Intel and one new AMD desktop processor every quarter. Boards from Super Socket 7 and Slot 1 to LGA775, Socket F and AM2+. Socket 603 Xeons fit Socket 604 boards, as in reality.
• 48 graphics cards from 2001 (GeForce3 and Radeon 8500 to the 9800 GX2 and HD 4870 X2), computing by their real FP32 throughput. No cards before 2001 - the fixed-function cards of the nineties could not compute. Boards with an AGP slot take one card.
• 17 memory modules (72-pin SIMM, SDRAM, RDRAM, DDR, DDR2, the first DDR3, registered ECC), 27 drives (IDE, SCSI, SATA, SAS, the first SSDs of 2008), 10 power supplies from before 80 PLUS (65-82 % efficient) and a 1U fan.
• 28 complete servers as they were bought whole - Dellmar PowerLedge, Compack and HQ ProLyant, IBN SystemLine, Sol Kobalt RaK - built from the parts of their time, on sale from launch to successor, used a year later. Their list price never falls below their parts.
• Real launch dates and prices; where the research had none, the estimate is marked in the code. Desktop processors and unified-shader cards of 2006-2008 mine Bitcoin at an estimated rate per architecture.
• New parts are sold new for economy.newStockYears, then used, like everything else. In creative they have a tab of their own, "Data Center: 1998-2008"; the other two tabs look as in 1.9.1. The Reorder button only reorders parts the Shop sells in that world.

Hosting from 1999

• Single-server racks, two blocks tall: the Server Shelf (a tower on an open wire shelf; customers up to Small Business, on sale until the end of 2003) and the Server Cabinet (one 7U server in a 42U cabinet, until the end of 2005). Each holds one server. The five-server Hosting Rack arrives in 2001.
• Rents from real price history: the cheapest dedicated server $200 a month in 1999, $100 in 2001, down to the $30 of 2009; storage from about $5 per GB (1999) to 15 cents (2006). IP transit took its share: $800 per Mbit/s in 1999, $12 in 2008.
• A hosting machine has a type, switched in a new row of its panel: Dedicated (as always), Shared Hosting (webspace, mail, reseller or game servers - hundreds of accounts on one box; needs cPanel or Plesk), VPS (from 2002; needs a hypervisor from the Software Lab - VMware ESX, Virtuozzo, Xen, OpenVZ) or Colocation (customers bring their own servers into an empty Hosting Rack or Server Cabinet; you pay their power and keep them cool). Prices per account, VPS and cabinet follow the real market of each year; a fill dial allows overbooking, at a cost in reputation.
• Customers come month by month and belong to you, not to a server: orders fill free places, 3-4.4 % cancel every month (Interland 2001-2004), reputation brings up to three times the orders. Company sites, dotcoms, shops, e-mail, forums, game servers, video and Web 2.0 each need, pay and cancel differently, and your own mix of them shapes the box.
• The dotcom crash: customers pay up to 115 % in the boom (early 2000), then cancel and default - after Pets.com the dotcoms leave, the bottom comes in October 2002, recovery after Google's IPO; Lehman hits in 2008. 34 internet News from 1999 to 2008 (Boo.com, Exodus, WorldCom, September 11, YouTube, Amazon EC2 ...); the worms Code Red, Nimda, SQL Slammer and Blaster crash Windows servers more often while they spread.
• Electricity prices 1995-2004 from the EIA (4.43 ct/kWh in 1999, 5.25 in 2004); from mid-2005 unchanged.
• Server systems of 1996-2003 in the Software Lab - Linux 2.0-2.4, Red Hat 6/7, Windows NT 4.0/2000/2003 Server, FreeBSD 3/4, Solaris 7/8 - until their end of life. Their effects are game assumptions.

Fixes

• Used fans and drives no longer sell back at the price of new ones - they have no durability, so buying one used and selling it straight back paid every time; a used one now sells back for half, like other used parts (fans and drives bought used before this version keep their old value).

Save format

• New world files data/datacenter_calendar.dat (the world's start) and, only in worlds that use the hosting types, data/datacenter_hosting_customers.dat. New optional block keys on hosting machines (hostingMode, hostingFill, hostingOffer), written only when not the default - every machine from before loads as Dedicated.
• Every purchase id of 1.9.1 is unchanged; the new listings come after all of them.