wmhbl...@comcast.net (William H. Blair) writes: > Of course, to some people it wasn't "common knowledge." > But folks were no more interested in hearing about the > two-digit year problem in 1981 than they were in 1995. > Nobody (but some banks and a lot of software vendors) > cared. It would not hit the fan until much later, as I > am sure everyone now well remembers.
I had gotten blamed for online computer conferencing on the internal network in the late 70s and early 80s (back then it was decidedly not viewed as a good thing). after some investigation there was eventually decided to have officially sanctioned online computer conferencing (implemented with CMS "toolsrun" exec ... basically concurrently supported both mailing listserv-like operation as well as usenet kind of operation). in any case there was an internal computer conference (CENTURY) discussing the upcoming y2k problem ... old post in the discussion from somebody working with nasa about some related problems: To: Distribution Date: 7 December 1984, 14:35:02 CST 1.In 1969, Continental Airlines was the first (insisted on being the first) customer to install PARS. Rushed things a bit, or so I hear. On February 29, 1972, ALL of the PARS systems cancelled certain reservations automatically, but unintentionally. There were (and still are) creatures called "coverage programmers" who deal with such situations. 2.A bit of "cute" code I saw once operated on a year by loading a byte of packed data into a register (using INSERT CHAR), then used LA R,1(R) to bump the year. Got into a bit of trouble when the year 196A followed 1969. I guess the problem is not everyone is aware of the odd math in calendars. People even set up new religions when they discover new calendars (sometimes). 3.We have an interesting calendar problem in Houston. The Shuttle Orbiter carries a box called an MTU (Master Timing Unit). The MTU gives yyyyddd for the date. That's ok, but it runs out to ddd=400 before it rolls over. Mainly to keep the ongoing orbit calculations smooth. Our simulator (hardware part) handles a date out to ddd=999. Our simulator (software part) handles a date out to ddd=399. What we need to do, I guess, is not ever have any 5-week long missions that start on New Year's Eve. I wrote a requirements change once to try to straighten this out, but chickened out when I started getting odd looks and snickers (and enormous cost estimates). ... snip ... past threads, posting the above: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#24 BA Solves Y2K (Was: Re: Chinese Solve Y2K) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#94 Those who do not learn from history... http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003p.html#21 Sun researchers: Computers do bad math ;) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006r.html#16 Was FORTRAN buggy? past posts mentioning the internal network http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internet -- 40+yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
