On Fri, Jan 18, 2019 at 10:43 AM Michael Torrie <torr...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On 01/16/2019 12:02 PM, Avi Gross wrote: > > I recall the days before the year 2000 with the Y2K scare when people > > worried that legacy software might stop working or do horrible things once > > the clock turned. It may even have been scary enough for some companies to > > rewrite key applications and even switch from languages like COBOL. > > Of course it wasn't just a scare. The date rollover problem was very > real. It's interesting that now we call it the Y2K "scare" and since > most things came through that okay we often suppose that the people who > were warning about this impending problem were simply being alarmist and > prophets of doom. We often deride them. But the fact is, people did > take these prophets of doom seriously and there was a massive, even > heroic effort, to fix a lot of these critical backend systems so that > disaster was avoided (just barely). I'm not talking about PCs rolling > over to 00. I'm talking about banking software, mission critical > control software. It certainly was scary enough for a lot of companies > to spend a lot of money rewriting key software. The problem wasn't with > COBOL necessarily.
I had one client, a hedge fund, that I fixed literally 1000's of Y2K issues for. When Y2K came and there were no problems, the owner said to me "You made such a big deal about the Y2K thing, and nothing happened." -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
