On 1/17/2010 3:24 PM, John Sessoms wrote:
From: "Bob W"
> naah the millennium bug was as real as the majority votes for >
dubya's presidencies.
>
The millennium bug was real. I was one of the generations of
programmers who
wrote it. The reason it turned into a damp squib is that I was also
one of
the people who fixed it, before it blew up.
The lesson to be learned from that is that if you do something about an
imminent disaster, nobody will believe it was ever going to happen.
Bob
There was a lot of unnecessary doom and gloom about it; elevators
falling and airplanes crashing hyped as possible fallout.
My take was it was going to result in a lot of screwed up utility &
credit card bills ... maybe some airline reservations falling out of
the sky, but no actual airliners.
Life safety critical applications just didn't get written in COBOL and
its successors.
It only resulted in a FEW screwed up utility bills that I'm aware of -
because it did mostly get fixed in time. And what little didn't get
fixed beforehand was soon enough fixed after.
I also noted at the time, although no one cared what I thought, that
any financial institution writing conventional 30 year mortgages was
aware of the problem in 1970 ... 1971 at the latest.
The 2036 and 2058 bugs are more likely to have well mid air collisions,
but I expect to be dead or immortal by then.
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