Re: Question: How will the Year 2000 bug impact your work?

scollarw@cadvision.com (guzzibill) wrote: >On 10/18/96, Andy Lankester composed a News article about Re: >Question: How will the Year 2000 bug impact your work?: >~You don't think it's a problem? Check the going rate for >*experienced* >~mainframe COBOL contract programmers. That's a REAL measure of the >~problem. It will be even worse in Europe with the billing changes >~needed for a common currency coinciding with Y2K. Whatever you may >~think it's the mainframes that run the systems that support your >~interactions with government and the corporate world - so maybe YOU >~should worry as well. >~ >~Andy >~ I think the problem arose from two things: 1) Ten or more years ago there was a mindset that said that all systems had a life of under 10 years, so stuff further away that this just wasn't considered. This applied the managers, users and developers. I remember in about 1980 trying to get some sense from users about how much history to store and how to select & delete the obsolete stuff. Nobody was interested, so we sized the system to hold 10 years of complete history, documented this very clearly, and put space checks in the code. I imagine somebody made a decision when the 'database getting full' warnings started to appear. 2) the CODASYL standard (certainly through COBOL 80 and I think 85 as well) mandated that the system data would be read into a 6 digit field. Century not permitted! I think this induced a blind spot in designers and programmers, hence all the COBOL systems without centuries in files. The crux of the problem isn't the difficulty of the problem its the bulk. Doing a simple search&destroy mission in a few programs is not a problem, but when each system has anything up to several hundred programs and all the documentation has been lost or is out of date and all the develelopment staff left long ago it will take a lot of time and cost like crazy to fix. Now multiply that by the number of mainframe sites in the world. Yes, there are still 3 years to go, but are there enough qualified staff in the world to fix all those systems by the deadline? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Martin Gregorie |Logica UK Ltd Gregorie@logica.com |All opinions expressed are solely those +44 (0171) 637 9111 |of the author and not of Logica ----------------------------------------------------------------------