--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Hugo" <richardhughes...@...> wrote: > > In 1999 I was working for a technology PR company that > monitored Y2K stories for a 'well known software giant' > and it seemed to me that the stories of impending doom > came primarily from newspapers desperate to sell copy > and from computer companies trying to make a buck riding > on the wave of hysteria. > The best post apocalypse show ever made. As bleak as the > day is long. I like my doom and gloom.
By the way, not to get into the "debate" any deeper than to laugh at one side of it, I have a similar experience of Y2K to pass along. I made a *shitload* of money from Y2K. I worked on an *enormous* Y2K project for a major American retailer for almost a year. At such extravagant rates that I won't embarrass them by naming the corporation. I worked not on the programming side but in configuration management, trying to make sure that every line of code that made up the thousands of programs that supported their tens of thousands of employees and millions of customers were archived somewhere in source code control, so that they could be fixed if Y2K broke them. My side of the project took a year because we found less than 20% of these corporate assets *were* under source code control when we started. Willy doesn't know his Y2K ass from a hole in the ground. It wasn't about DOS; it was about mainframes, and primarily the COBOL programs still running on those mainframes. Y2K brought tens of thousands of retired COBOL programmers out of retirement to work on it. I assume they padded their pockets as much as I did. Anyway, the managers of this company's Y2K project decided to attempt to justify their effort by running not only the new versions of all the programs they'd "fixed" on January 1st, but the *old*, "unfixed" versions as well, running in parallel. They did this for a week, and then filed their report to the board. The report stated with some pride that not a single program they had "fixed" crashed due to a Y2K bug during this week-long period. The report never mentioned that not a single "unfixed" program running during the same test period had crashed.
