Re: The Great Year-2000 Hoax!

I've read and re-read this posting & I'm still not sure what point it's making. The argument seems to be: 1. Year 2000 FUD abounds (true) 2. People are making money out of it (true) 3. Nobody's saying the FUD isn't justifiable (true-ish, although I expect to hear a lot more nay-saying over the next year) 4. The FUD really isn't justifiable, and the year 2000 is going to come and go without any of the "magnificent disasters" (curious phrase) which have been foretold (highly debatable) 5. Joe Public doesn't know what the issue really is (sadly true) 6. Joe Public is going to take his revenge on the computer industry when he sobers up from New Year's Day, 2000 and discovers the world's computers are still running (highly debatable). The argument seems to hinge on point 6, which strikes me as plain weird. "Revenge"? Sure, the popular standing of the industry might take a knock, but it's not as if it ever was all that high - IT has never been regarded as a capital-P profession, after all. In any case, the scenario in point 6 depends on businesses _not_ taking measures to prevent Year 2000 problems: if it's generally perceived that businesses have taken such measures, a disaster-free 1/1/2000 would only go to prove how effective those measures were. (Catch-22?) As for point 4, I can only go on personal experience. My previous employer had a number of "legacy" systems, some written as recently as the late eighties, in which YYMMDD dates were *standard* (in my programming days I caused a lot of comment by insisting on using YYYYMMDD). One record layout I recall included a six-digit date as part of a compound key - something like nnnddddddxx. (The three 'n's, incidentally, were a branch number. By the early nineties the company had 900+ branches. All good fun). The rest is down to business rationality. How long would those systems stay in use? As long as they didn't break down and continued to meet the business's needs. When would they be re-engineered to meet non-business-related requirements? When those requirements became so pressing as to stop the system running in the near future. How much work would be put into such a re-engineering exercise? As little as possible, consistent with keeping the system running. Two final questions. How many companies are there with priorities like the above? I think you'd only find an outlook less tightly focussed on the bottom line among the really cash-rich corporates, if there. And how common, among the IT departments of the world in the "legacy years", was the belief that six-figure dates were good enough? Here the FUD starts, of course, but I can't see any reason to put it any lower than "pretty damn common"! Hoax? I don't think so. Phil Edwards phil@news400.com Editor, NEWS/400.UK +44 (0)161 929 0777