Re: The Great Year-2000 Hoax!

In article Sundial Services <info@sundialservices.com> wrote: > >What John Q. Public does not realize is that we have been thinking about the >Year 2000 since 1970 and before. We had to. Every case is obviously >different but as a general rule I think it's entirely appropriate to say that >the general issue of the 21st century is not catching the data processing >industry particularly by surprise, and it's not coming to a head this year for >any particular reason. As a person who entered into the industry in the mid 1980's fresh out of college, I will tell you you are wrong. When I first started working and saw the atrocious way dates were being handled in order to save space, I mentioned and got various responses from the more senior staff (as well as people outside the staff - including management) well into the early/mid-1990's: 1) That's not my problem, I won't be here then 2) That's a long ways off, worry about it then 3) There are higher priorities 4) We may be on a different system by then Fortunately, they are on a different system now, but the legacy system with it's PL/1 programs and flat file data would have required a pretty major kludge to have worked without being redesigned and rewritten. >Well, you never see a set of data without knowing a great deal about it. For Excuse me? You must live in a very special world. Maybe I'll know what century the data was entered in, but I see data all the time which I know nothing about except what I can derive from the table schemas. Regards, Cathy ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Cathy Kipp E-mail: ckipp@verinet.com Principal Consultant Fort Collins, Colorado, USA Database Strategies, Inc. Phone: 1-970-226-0240 Informix User Group of Colorado - President International Informix User Group - Board of Directors ------------------------------------------------------------------------