In 1975 there was a BOF, Bird's of a Feather Session on Year 2000 Concerns at the SPRING SHARE meeting, as I recall. BOF's were spontaneous evening meetings posted/scheduled usually that day.
Barry Herbert W. “Barry” Merrill, PhD President-Programmer Merrill Consultants MXG Software 10717 Cromwell Drive Dallas, TX 75229 www.mxg.com [email protected] -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Paul Gilmartin Sent: Friday, April 20, 2018 5:27 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: IRS - 60-Year-Old IT System Failed on Tax Day Due to New Hardware (nextgov.com) On Fri, 20 Apr 2018 19:25:54 +0000, Lester, Bob wrote: > >I agree with both you and Gil. But, how many programmers in the 60s, 70s, >even 80s were thinking about Y2K? Sure, the really good ones were, but what >about the other 80%? > >....and, Y2K came off without a hitch...(FSVO - "hitch") 😊 >-----Original Message----- >From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List Porowski, Kenneth >Sent: Friday, April 20, 2018 1:20 PM > >That was due to lack of foresight by the programmer not due to the age of the >system. > True in the sense that it affected one-year-old computers as much as older computers running th same software. I'm disappointed that this thread has so much focused on Y2K which I meant only as an extreme example. Things change. Y2K was only more precisely forseeable. Increasing complexity of the tax code requires new logic. Inflation and rate escalation may have made some data fields inadequate in size. E-filing requires network interfaces and code to support them and causes the one-day spike in workload. I gather from these fora that COBOL is not comfortably suited to TCP/IP. IBM bet that SNA/VTAM could crush TCP/IP and customers were the losers. IBM bet that EBCDIC could crush ASCII and customers were the losers. And customers bet that COBOL skills would remain in the forefront of availability. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
