9 Feb
2010
9 Feb
'10
5:10 p.m.
On 9 Feb 2010 at 15:50, Rich Alderson wrote:
In those industries in which there is a lot of legacy
COBOL code
(which is to say, those industries most affected by the so-called "Y2K
bug"), wraparound on dates is not a particularly good idea. I note
the little old lady in the UK who got a letter from her insurance
company expressing congratulations over the arrival of her new baby
girl: A wrap-around year calculation had turned the 101 year old
woman into an infant.
That wasn't my point. What I was getting at was that an awful lot of
code was rewritten unnecessarily simply to accommodate the "bump"
created by Y2K. Not making provision for someone being older than
99 is just plain stupid.
When I think of a military customer from the 1970's, with tons of
7080 COBOL with undocumented binary patches (probably to 'ENTER
AUTOCODER" routines) all running under emulation, the amount of work
needed to unravel that mess for Y2K would have been incredible.
--Chuck