There was a piece in the Travel section of our paper today - a reprint traffic, but airplanes won't fall, experts say". It went on to touch lightly on some perhaps plausible scenarios such as networked air traffic control computers losing capability to communicate, and the in-plane flight management computer which handles navigation and related chores. These were discussed briefly as items that would reduce the number of planes flying or actually grounding a plane when it did not pass its pre-takeoff checks, but not as flight safety items. There was also some idiocy about an FAA inspector grounnding all of an airline's pilots because all of their flight physicals had expired 100 years ago. But then the article got into the embedded chip thing, worrying that some chip somewhere in their fire trucks might get confused and lock up which would shut down the airport since they may not operate without fire and crash equipment operable. Now I admit that I am not too knowledgeable about fire trucks - airport type or otherwise - but this rather reminds me of the fears expressed by some concerning embedded chips in microwaves, digital clocks, electric ovens, sprinkler timers, etc. Am I dense? I have at least one each of the above (not including fire trucks) and no one of them has the foggiest notion what year it is! Because of the firmware, some few care what day it is, but to the best of my knowledge there are seven days in a week irrespective what year it is, or even the month. It would really be nice if the thoughts and opinions of truly knowledgeable folks were to be published and all of this type of panic mongering put firmly to bed! By the way, when my Kaypro 10 crosses over the mark it will then report the date is 01 JAN 99. - don

On Mon, 4 Jan 1999, Tony Duell wrote: The only thing I can think of where a date issue would cause a system to be Y2K non-compliant is something that tracks days throughout the year, and thus would need to know if February is 28 or 29 days this year. The VCR I bought in 1993 (Panasonic) has a 4-digit year field for programming, and does go to 2000 and beyond. Sellam Alternate e-mail: dastar(a)siconic.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Always being hassled by the man. Coming in 1999: Vintage Computer Festival 3.0 See http://www.vintage.org/vcf for details! [Last web site update: 12/27/98]

Tony wrote: I entirely agree. IMNSHO, the biggest real Y2K problem will be the run on the banks, which will not happen for any technical reason, but only because people are whipped into a frenzy about the Y2K problem. Basically a self-fulfilling prophecy. Especially ironic since the banking industry is considered to be at the least risk for Y2K technical problems, since they started working on it long before most people even thought about it. The Federal Reserve has printed an extra 5.0e10 dollars to try to prevent a collapse of the banking system. I think that's really a clever move to try to instill confidence that there won't be banking problems; if there really IS a run on the banks, 50 billion won't cover it. Hmmm... since there might be a run on the banks, maybe I'd better take my money out before it happens, and invest it in something with lasting value, like computers. :-) Eric

At 10:53 PM 1/4/99 -0000, Eric wrote: Hmm. I've already done that without intending to! :-/ Joe