On 7/21/2012 9:27 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> 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
>
I think the issue would have hit a lot of financial companies, and a lot 
of DOS/Windows machines, but not all of them. Mostly financial though. A 
"Huge" issue with most banks was that many still ran mainframes, with 
old COBOL in them. To save space, the whole systems used a two digit 
number to track dates. And, no, I don't mean an integer, I mean a "human 
readable" two digit number, which could only contain 0-9, in two characters.

Due to the way they where coded, you would have had to either rewrite 
the entire systems, or you had to convert the existing DBs to something 
that did work, or you had to add code to "work around" the problem. The 
first one was mad, the second one not possible (since many of them 
couldn't afford to just boat anchor their mainframe, or install a real 
OS and language on them), and the last one.. while more viable, was just 
a total pain in the ass. We could have ended up with today's recession, 
12 years ago, as whole banks "lost track" of when, who, how much, and 
maybe even, in some cases, to what, money was owed.

Post a reply to this message