[11387] in Public-Access_Computer_Systems_Forum
Re: Will Your Computer Crash in 2000?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Steve Cavrak)
Tue Jun 17 20:17:16 1997
Date: Tue, 17 Jun 1997 17:02:07 -0500
From: Steve Cavrak <sjc@lemming.uvm.edu>
To: PACS-L@LISTSERV.UH.EDU
Reply-To: Public-Access Computer Systems Forum <PACS-L@LISTSERV.UH.EDU>
----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Your "skepticism" about the year 2000 crisis it generally well founded;
there is nothing like a computer goof up to excite people, and when
you tie this into the "end of the century", you get all sorts of fun
things.
- one glitch was caught in Vermont which issues 1, 2, and 4 year driver
licenses. 4 year driver licenses issued on January 2, 1997 expired on
Jan 1, 2000 - rather than Jan 1, 2001. The bug was fixed the same day.
- the problem has been identified for at least 25 years; and the main
set of concern is the UNKNOWN quantity of dusty old COBOL programs that
form the basis of (supposedly anyway) the bulk of corporate computing.
The anxiety seems to center around the difficulty of tracking down
all of those cobol programs and fixing them -- the programmers who
wrote them have long since been retired, forgotten, etc.
Ciao
Steve
