231–240 of 385 posts
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> that printed year 100 Did it print the year "100" or "19100"?
At the Living Computer Museum in Seattle they have an IBM S/360 that prints out we’re in year 19120.
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Couldn't the rollover be simulated ahead of time by simply setting the date forward? Seems crazy that you had to have people on the ground fixing things as the clock struck 0.
Sure. On systems under your control. It's the network of interacting systems that prevents this from being so simple.
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The only global retailer that we've all heard of that owned stores in Germany in 1999 but doesn't now (note the "used to own stores" in the comment) is Walmart: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2006/jul/28/retail.mone...
That's a bingo. I wasn't particularly trying to obfuscate. I'm curious how you so quickly figured it out though.
Yes, the y2k crisis was real, or more accurately, would have been a serious crisis if people had not rushed and spent lots of money to deal with it ahead of time. In many systems it would have been no big deal if unfixed, but there were a huge number of really important systems that would have been a serious problem had they not been fixed. Part of the challenge was that this was an immovable deadline, often if thing…
I'm having PTSD just thinking about updates of YY to CCYY in mainframe code. Very real and heavy investment across numerous industries from aviation to financial and more. At a macro level, I remember it being pretty well managed risk and mitigation.
Yes, the y2k crisis was real, or more accurately, would have been a serious crisis if people had not rushed and spent lots of money to deal with it ahead of time. In many systems it would have been no big deal if unfixed, but there were a huge number of really important systems that would have been a serious problem had they not been fixed. Part of the challenge was that this was an immovable deadline, often if thing…
The sceptic inside me is curious as to how much they actually accomplished in their effort to fix it. I mean, yes, they spent billions to get millions of lines of code read, but how many fixes have been made and what would be the cost (when compared to those billions of dollars spent) if they weren't fixed at all.
I worked for Hyder, the Welsh Water and Gas authority, on their Y2K project, from March 1998 to November 1998. Their billing and management system was written in COBOL, and contained numerous Y2K bugs. If we did nothing, then the entire billing system would have collapsed. That would mean Welsh people either receiving no bills, or bills for >100 years of gas/water supply, depending on the bug that got triggered. Very…
Yes, the y2k crisis was real, or more accurately, would have been a serious crisis if people had not rushed and spent lots of money to deal with it ahead of time. In many systems it would have been no big deal if unfixed, but there were a huge number of really important systems that would have been a serious problem had they not been fixed. Part of the challenge was that this was an immovable deadline, often if thing…
> people literally spent tens of billions of dollars in effort to fix it The sceptic inside me is curious as to how much they actually accomplished in their effort to fix it. I mean, yes, they spent billions to get millions of lines of code read, but how many fixes have been made and what would be the cost (when compared to those billions of dollars spent) if they weren't fixed at all.
With an auditorium full of others who had barely any programming experience, he was given a crash course in Cobol for a month, and then he had to go through thousands of lines of code of bank software that ran on some mainframe and identify all cases where a date was hard-coded as 2 characters.
Extremely tedious work, but there were tons of fixes to be made.
The problem was real, and the billions that were spent on fixing things were necessary.
this is basically ALL OF LIFE in IT OPERATIONS. lol.