Re: Remember Y2K?
When I studied programming at university in the 70's my lecturer emphasised that software we wrote then would still be in use at the turn of the century so we must always use 4 digits for the year. When I tried to implement this in my student placement the next year the senior developer I worked for refused to let me use 4 digit years as 'we can't afford the storage and anything you write will be replaced in a couple of years', Roll forward 15 years and I rejoined the organisation as the tech support manager. The suite of programs I had written as a student had been altered significantly but were still in use, even better the code base had been so stable it hadn't been looked at for over 5 years, unfortunately it still had 2 digit years, The suite was a feed from line of business systems into the finance application so failure would have stopped all financial processes. During the period the organisation had moved completely away fro COBOL and the only 2 people in the organisation who had ever programmed in it were myself and one of my sysprogs needless to say she did a fantastic job and the issue was mitigated well before the millennium. The irony was that the senior dev was still there and was responsible for the core finance application. Come the millennium all the line of business systems carried on working, the feeds executed perfectly but the finance system stopped because the cockwomble had not chased the supplier for the service pack required to make the core system y2k compliant. AC to preserve the reputation of the organisation I'd happily embarrass arrogant idiot who brought us to our knees for 48 hours while we had to fix his mess.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
