RE: Y2K, it's all my fault
Gavin Thomas Nicol (gtn@ebt.com)
Fri, 8 Oct 1999 14:27:37 -0400
> I remember vaguely thinking that the program would stop working in
> 2000. But hey, it was more than 30 years away, and that no one would
> be running Cobol programs in 2000, the computers would all be obsolete
> and replaced by then, and certainly no one would be using archaic
> Cobol, when they could have easily reprogrammed things in ALGOL. We
> all believed in the future, then; things would be better in the
> future, and all of the current cruft of the world would be replaced
> with clean and shiny new future stuff. Also, writing out those
> programs on coding forms with a pencil was really a pain, and there
> was no way to test anything where the 'current date' was 2000 anyway,
> so... why bother?
>
> Anyway, I wanted to apologize. Ever since I heard about Y2K,
> I've been feeling guilty. It's my fault.
As we're all coming out of the woods on things... I was involved in an
automated testing project (using marksheet readers etc. to take scores)
for an ESL program in Tokyo. I used a single word offset (16 bits) for
days since 1986... still a lot better than Y2K, but...
Anyway, that program was 12,000 lines of Turbo Pascal...