[Coco] Y2K fixes (comment on hysteria)

[Mark Raphael]

I worked on a few corporate systems in 1998 and 1999 getting ready for Y2K.
One of the major problems we had to fix was when a date value is subtracted
from another date value to find the number of days, months, and/or years.
between the two dates.  Remember, for the most part, older legacy systems
previously only stored the last 1 or 2 digits of the year number. Before
year 2000, it was no sweat ie. 99 - 98 = 1 year.  But look what happens in
year 2000: 00 - 99 = -99 years.  Has quite an impact when you are trying to
compute compounded interest, late charges, etc.

Now before everyone starts in on "well, that's what happens when you have
1950's short-sighted management who didn't think that these systems and data
might be around for a long time", I read an article shortly after Y2K that
said that, in fact, it would have cost more to store the 4-digit years for
40-50 years leading up to 2000 (remember, storage used to be quite
expensive) that it did to remediate all the systems that needed fixing.

The short and skinny is that Y2K didn't happen because talented programmers
like myself fixed the problem in time.

Mark Raphael

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Message: 1
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 07:28:42 -0600
From: Frank Swygert <farna at att.net>
Subject: [Coco] Y2K fixes (comment on hysteria)
To: coco at maltedmedia.com
Message-ID: <3FE6F18A.7050406 at att.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed

You know, I'm not the smartest person in the world, but I always figured 
the only thing that would be wrong with almost any system is it just 
wouldn't report the date right. Now that might be a problem with a check 
writing program, as it would either print 19100 or 1899 on a check, and 
the bank might give someone a hard time cashing that, but it really 
doesn't affect games or graphic programs -- would just report the wrong 
date in the directory listing for files. I suppose a database might be 
in trouble if it searches files or facts by date, and that is where 
businesses were supposed to be in trouble (as well as with checks)?? 
Maybe an older alarm system with an embedded controller wouldn't work 
right? Even if the computer did stop working, I'd just reset the date to 
1800 and recognize myself that it's really 1900... like my daughter does 
with her system to keep a couple demo programs going after their 
expiration date (they store the installed date and count 30 days from 
that instead of having code to count days or times used, obviously).
-- 
Frank Swygert -- Gulfport, MS
Publisher, "American Independent Magazine" (AIM)
Supporting all AMC related vehicles, 1902-1987
Website: http://farna.home.att.net/AIM.html
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