Re: Remember Y2K?

["Michael Naughton" <michael_naughton@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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I, too, can't come up with any examples of widespread disaster (hey -- my
company hired me to fix them all before they occurred, and I did! :-), but
I do know of some real -- if isolated problems. For example, where I work
(a manufacturer), our raw materials are considered outdated if they are
more than 2 years old. Since we were using 6-digit (numeric) dates, right
after New Years, 1998, any incoming material was flagged as already
outdated, as its expiration date was back in the year zero.

My (future) boss fixed that one up in a hurry, but I was  hired in April
to go through the whole system. For me, it was a good move, so I'm not
complaining.

On the one hand, I agree that a lot of the Y2K scare was based on
ignorance and hype, and most of the scary scenarios were really unlikely.
On the other hand, I think that the reason it turned out to be such a
non-event is that enough people (like us) took it seriously enough to fix
the problems we thought really existed. We did our job, it worked, and the
result is thta nothing happened.

IMHO, to say that all that effort wasn't necessary is like saying that we
don't need air traffic controllers -- after all, airplanes almost never
crash into each other, so what's the problem?

Non-Technical Discussion about the AS400 / iSeries
<midrange-nontech@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>Then again, pretty much all has been quiet. Not absolutely, but overall?
>Y2K was a non-event.


Mike Naughton
Senior Programmer/Analyst
Judd Wire, Inc.
124 Turnpike Road
Turners Falls, MA  01376
413-863-4357 x444
mnaughton@xxxxxxxxxxxx