On Sat, 21 Jul 2012 15:54:07 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> On 7/20/2012 14:38, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> On Thu, 19 Jul 2012 16:11:39 -0700, Darren New wrote:
>>
>>> On 7/12/2012 7:25, Le_Forgeron wrote:
>>>> Then Y2K failed to happen (as a catastroph)
>>>
>>> I've never been able to figure out whether this should be "Then Y2K
>>> failed to happen" or "Thus Y2K failed to happen".
>>
>> Clearly Y2K happened, since it's 2012.
>>
>> The predicted Y2K computing technology disaster is what failed to
>> happen.  Planes failed to fall from the sky, the power grid failed to
>> fail, the phones kept working.
> 
> I understand.

Well, yeah, I figured you understood it.  I was at that stage attempting 
to be funny (Y2K didn't fail to happen - it's 2012, and Y2K came before 
2012).

>> Society failed to fall into a dark age due to technology failures.
> 
> Sure. But was it because everyone worried about it so much they were
> willing to pay COBOL programmers $200K/year to fix it? Or was it just
> never really a problem to start with?
> 
> Given the broadcast of the cheering from the FAA when the clocks rolled
> over GMT and planes didn't fall out of the sky, I'm not totally inclined
> to dismiss the first possibility.

I'm not really inclined that way either.  I had systems that needed to be 
updated to deal with potential issues, but I don't know that anyone knows 
for sure that if we'd done nothing if there would've been the chaos that 
was predicted.

Jim

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