Denial (Millennium Problem) LO10769

Johanna Rothman (jr@world.std.com)
Tue, 29 Oct 1996 22:50:27 -0500

Replying to LO10745 --

At 2:07 PM 10/28/96, Sherri Malouf wrote:

>[...]that many computers
>are not capable of going past the year 1999 and that we really don't have
>a handle on the true impact this will have. It reminded of the only
>article I have seen about the problem and it was on a consultant hired by
>the Federal government to deal with the problem. His comment was
>basically that too little was being done too late.
>
>So, I then thought -- well the government is probably focusing most of its
>efforts on security issues. Then I thought -- this is crazy! If
>computers had been invented in the 1500's I can understand the calendar
>thing. But most computers have hit the market in the last 20 years.
>While technology moves quickly didn't anyone think about this? We have
>complex relational data bases but we don't have the year 2000?

The physical machines are not totally relevant to this discussion. It's
the applications that are running on those machines that are relevant.
There are a large number of Operating Systems that have compatibility
modes, so that the *same* applications that were written in the 60's,
70's, and early '80's are still running. For example, code I wrote in 1977
is still in use. (Crazy to me, and luckily had no date implications.) All
of us on that particular project were *positive* the code would be
completely rewritten in 10 years. And, the things we did to manage the
memory we did have were impressive.

Before the mid-80's computer memory was very expensive. I worked on *many*
machines with < 4 MB main memory. We used overlays and swap space, etc.
And we wrote code to save space. Those of us who could not remember all of
the little tricks used more memory and got poor performance reviews,
because we *didn't* do the things that seemed short-sighted!

[...]
>But could this date
>issue actually bring about chaos? Do you know how many of the services you
>receive are based on a computerized calendar? Are we living in denial
>about a technical aspect of this system and what can we learn based on our
>behavior?

See http://www.year2000.com/ for some rational dicussions and the denials
being faced by some companies.

Johanna

--
Rothman Consulting Group, Inc.  URL:http://world.std.com/~jr/
voice:617-641-4046    fax:617-641-2764       jr@world.std.com
Management Consulting for High Technology Product Development
 


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