[email protected] (Paul Gilmartin) writes: > Don't underestimate the future. > > The Y2K "crisis" might have been mitigated if more designers > had said, "Hey, pretty soon we're going to need 4-digit years. > Let's provide them now." I made such a suggestion for a product > we were working on in 1987. It was brushed off as premature. > > And much of the anguish of 24-bit to 31-bit address conversion > might have been avoided if designers had thought to reserve > the top 8 bits of addresses instead of using them for flags. > Instead, many OS interfaces remain 24-bit constrained. > > How many programmers are still using 31-bit branch instructions > rather than 64 because z/OS doesn't support execution above > the bar? This year.
there was a CENTURY discussion on the internal network early to mid-80s ... discussing the looming y2k problem. I've previously reposted somebody's post to the CENTURY discussion about similar/related issues at NASA: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#email841207 in this old Y2K thread http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#24 BA Solves Y2K (Was: Re: Chinese Solve Y2K) other past refs: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001n.html#74 The demise of compaq http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009n.html#53 Long parms...again http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010i.html#65 Of interest to the Independent Contractors on the list http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010m.html#47 OT: Found an old IBM Year 2000 manual http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010o.html#41 60 Minutes News Report:Unemployed for over 99 weeks! misc. references to the internal network (larger than the arpanet/internet from just about the beginning until sometime late '85 or early '86) other Y2K trivia ... one of the too-big-to-fail financial institutions had outsourced much of their Y2K remediation to the lowest bidder ... in this case a software company located it in the Brighton Beach area of Brooklyn. It wasn't until it was long over that they found out it was a front for an ethnic criminal organization (interesting hacks were found in various places that would trigger unlogged wire transfers to various places around the world). -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
