>From: "Dan Minette" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > >From: Reggie Bautista <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > >The reason there was no > > widespread chaos in the heavily computerized portions of the world is >that > > computer professionals in those heavily computerized countries and/or > > industries worked serious amounts of overtime to make sure that >everything > > worked as it should. > > > >Its not as though no effort was needed at all, rather the people selling >Y2K >fixes convinced a lot of people that they needed a lot more work than they >possibly could. I know at my company that the effort to compy with Y2K was >way out of porportion to the risk. > >If I am wrong, why didn't all the non-compliant stuff that existed cause >serious difficulties? > >Dan M. > I agree, there were certainly a lot of snake oil salesmen spreading panic about imaginary problems. As I said in my original post, even if nothing had been done at all about Y2K, we probably would not have been facing problems of biblical proportions. Most of the companies that were old enough to have serious Y2K problems were companies that came into the computer age in the 1970s or before, and had not updated their software and/or hardware since that time. Those companies (for the most part) fixed what needed to be fixed, although it cost them a lot of time and even more money. All the critical stuff that needed to be fixed was fixed, and the stuff unimportant enough to be considered non-critical was, by definition, not important enough to need fixing. Some people tried to convince many that a lot of stuff that was non-critical should be considered critical. But some of this is a matter of perspective. The IRS replaced a whole bunch of desktop PCs from the 80's that couldn't handle the date change-over. Is the IRS critical? Depends on your perspective. Would the government have collapsed if it couldn't collect or account for our tax dollars? Maybe, maybe not. But if the government had collapsed, would here have been widespread chaos? Probably. The point is, it needed to be fixed, and it got fixed. Perhaps I overstated myself in my original post. "Widespread chaos" is subjective. If an insurance company goes out of business because it can't keep track of it's incoming or outgoing money, would that cause widespread chaos? Within that company, certainly. Within the economy as a whole, probably not, because companies that didn't go out of business would pick up the newly un-insured clients and the tax dollars would still flow. What I really meant to say in my original post is that I am upset by people who say Y2K was *all* hype and *no* substance, and denigrate the efforts of those who worked hard to solve real problems. But as you said above, "Its not as though no effort was needed at all, rather the people selling Y2K fixes convinced a lot of people that they needed a lot more work than they possibly could." In other words, there were some very important things that needed to be fixed, and people worked hard to fix those. But there were also a lot of things that didn't need to be fixed and there was a lot of effort needlessly wasted on Y2K. I hope that clarifies my position. Reg Bautista [EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com
