The Great Year-2000 Hoax! .. but what about -our- reputation?

I think that it is high time we in the data processing industry, to save our own professional reputations, should begin to actively counter the popular impression held by the public, that all DP systems in the world are going to crash and burn .. turn back into a pumpkin, if you will .. at midnight 1999. In spite of all that we hard-working system designers did, thirty and forty years ago, to design systems without such date-dependencies, it is now a popular view is that a computer cannot distinguish between 1900 and 2000. Furthermore, many toolmakers, Wall Street speculators, and industry consultants are scooping up windfall profits based on this illusion. Let me be very careful to say that these people are -not- deceiving the public, nor making false statements about their products, nor even making statements about a potential problem that are logically impossible. But I hear no -balancing- argument .. not from anyone! And when a truth or a prog- nostication is submitted without a balancing argument, Joe Public can easily deceive -himself-. What he is hearing constitutes a half-truth, and a half-truth is just short of... And let's not deceive ourselves that there's money in it right now. Joe Public doesn't have a =clue= how dates are or can be stored -- but if he gets scared enough he's gonna bolt and if there's a stained-glass window in the way then just-too-bad. But then, if while sitting in the hospital with a bunch of glass-cuts (figuratively speaking) he discovers it wasn't all that bad, or worse yet, he discovers that you pocketed a million bucks or so off his misfortunes ... he's gonna want his revenge. And he can get it. I look -beyond- the speculation, -beyond- the inevitable fact that "what comes up must come down" and the fact that at no time in the history of stockbrokering have certain people really accepted this. It's their money, to win or to lose. Rather .. my concern is about our industry. What does it say about US when highly credentialed tongue-waggers are saying with apparent authority that "a disaster of magnificent proportion will occur!?" And when people on the other side of this fence are silent? We are in the business of constructing software systems worth billions of dollars upon which our companies and our economy are utterly dependent. -Trust- is one of the greatest assets that we have. What are we doing to, or by neglect allowing to be done to, the public image and trust in our very competence? I respectfully submit to you, therefore, that we are harming ourselves in the long run by this silence. We should remain silent no more. Thanks for listening. Now back to your regularly scheduled newsgrouping.