I asked the question why we couldn’t just move the date on our computers to 12/31/99 and let it run over an see what happens. I was told there was more to it.
Anyway to make a long post less long, when will we know when we can breathe a sigh of relief?
Go ahead, sigh all you want. The most likely errors we’re going to see are in accounting systems. It’s not like there were never any computer errors before so we’ll deal with these like any other.
They don’t call me the colonel because I’m some dumb ass army guy.
Sorry, I left one thing out. Still kind of groggy here. Watch out on Feb 29 for Y2K type problems. Some systems won’t see Y2K as a leap year as they should.
In fact that’s how I identified a potential Y2K software glitch last year. I loaded some fiscal period data into an Oracle database from a text file. The file used a two digit year format which is still quie acceptable but I got an error because it found “29-FEB-00” to be an invalid date, interpreting it as 1900. It was an easy fix as Oracle has a built in date format that’s a variation on the so-called windowing method, a rollover year. Two digit years above 50 are interpreted as 19XX and years below are interpreted as 20XX.
They don’t call me the colonel because I’m some dumb ass army guy.
Microsofts wonderful answer is selling a new operating system in a month, W2000.
YOu can check your software mark at the website www.download.com clikc on Y2K link and first file should be an application tester. free, small programs.
I think Padeye has it right on the accounting systems. There may be a few chips out there to give us problems, but most of the serious errors (if any) are going to be Pacific Rim countries that didn’t or couldn’t aford to invest in Y2K changes that are going to find that they have really messed up books when their Accounts Receivables and Accounts Payables can’t correctly “age” accounts. (Manufacturing systems and shipping systems should have been encountering Y2K bugs for months–years for heavy industry–so I don’t expect any big surprises there.)
In the States and Europe, the bugs are going to be in individual lines of missed code or in bugs introduced by sloppy patches. Since we do that a lot anyway, I don’t think it is going to be a huge issue.
(However, “It’s a Y2K bug.” is going to be the most often heard excuse for computer errors for the next six months.)
Tom~
I would submit that the Y2K bug has been ongoing for the past year.
Where I work, it started in January 1999, when some applications that were forecasting a year in the future were coming up with some screwy results.
Those were quickly fixed, and by May those old (early 70s) programs had all been phased out.
I’m sure that that applied in a lot of other places, though, where stuff started shaking out before 01-01-00, but was quickly identified.