Posted Oct 25, 1999 by Cheerful Dragon
In all the panic and hype, one option seems to have escaped the masses of 'experts' - DO NOTHING. In any situation where there is a problem, you should always start with the question 'What happens if we don't do anything?' It may well be the case that nothing dreadful is going to happen. Unfortunately, so many people have been going around preaching gloom and doom that everybody is convinced that the sky will fall in at midnight on December 31st 1999. The fact is that a lot of systems won't be affected at all, some will show adverse effects well in advance, some will display problems as the date changes and others might have trouble well after the date change.
One interesting problem: A bank (can't remember which) decided to see what happened when the date changed, so it set the time and date to 23:59 31/12/1999. After the date had rolled over, staff ran the most common functions. They were surprised to find that the pounds were correct, but the pence made no sense at all. After a while an older member of staff did some quick calculations and determined that the computer was working in pounds, shillings and pence. It had decided that '00' was 1900, and consequently pre-decimalisation. Other than this, the bank's software worked perfectly.
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Posted Jan 20, 2000 by BuskingBob
I was of the "Do Nothing" philosophy until I realized how much overtime I was likely to accrue as a result of Y2K paranoia!
An example of the paranoia- I worked in a large computer firm, and had my own workstation checked on 3 different occasions by 3 different people. (this included our own staff plus some people sent down from HQ)
I also lost count of non-techie people in pubs ranting on about the Y2K problem being entirely due to incompetence. If they only knew how expensive ferrite-core memory was back in the old days!
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Posted Jan 20, 2000 by Cheerful Dragon
I would love to agree with you on the overtime thing, but I don't work in the right branch or area of IT to have anything much to do with the Y2K bug. I do, however, agree with you on the memory thing. My husband (non-techie) also thought that incompetence and lack of foresight ("Didn't they expect their systems to be in use after 1999?) were the main causes of the Y2K problem, until I put him straight. Even today you can find situations where you can't implement a decent solution because you aren't allowed enough memory. I know, I worked on one a few years ago. Hopefully, never again!
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