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Vic Smith

On Thu, 20 Mar 2008 11:46:11 -0500, wrote:

On Thu, 20 Mar 2008 04:13:41 -0600, Vic Smith
wrote:

I am one of the people who predicted Y2K was simply a scam to sell
hardware and software. Anyone with a basic understnding of the problem
should be able to deal with it. For most systems it was really a one
minute event.

I was one who predicted in 1980 that Y2K would be a big problem, but I
would be out of that business by then.
It was, and I wasn't.

What was the big problem?

Two byte year of birth, two byte year of policy inception, two byte
year of renewal date, blah, blah, blah.
Two year project to change programs and data streams.
Par for the course for most business "legacy" systems.
Many business apps use many dates for most everything they do.
Your insurance, banking, credit card, stocks, bonds, bills, etc, were
nearly all dependent on big changes to old apps.
When these mainframe apps were designed, conservation of precious disk
space, fast I/O and frugal CPU time was more important than thinking
20 years in the future.
Remember when you first read Orwell's "1984"?
I had no concept that 1984 it would come and go so quickly.
Never saw so many old guys come out of retirement to
cash in on the Y2K coding frenzy.
"Problem" might be strong. But it was a big "issue" in IT.
Big enough task that many apps weren't changed until time was short.
But nobody with any sense of the problem ever imagined the world
would end. I didn't mean that.

--Vic