Um, No..that's not the case. Just like anyone else back then, the Church
had the same problem.
They chose to let the wards and stakes run on PC's. Those PCs ran
Windows, and many of the
BIOS chips in those PCs where not programmed correctly to take the Year
2000 into account.
Also, many application under Windows/DOS were not programmed correctly
(ie: MIS).
As to UNIX/Mainframe:
The Church has long been one of IBM's biggest customers, especially on
the mainframe side
of the house. In that envrionment there is a plethora of languages,
JCL, standard applications
and custom programs that did not take the century rollover into account.
UNIX did not suffer that badly due to using Julian dating from epoch.
However, there was still
enough boneheaded programming to warrant checking to make sure that
dates will still work
come Jan 1, 2000.
Don't give the Church supernal credit for being slow. They were just
slow, and suffer from the
same problems that many other large organizations do. They have avoided
some problems by
studying issues to death, but have been bit by others, due to lack of
foresight by design teams
and management. This is to be expected. The people that work at HQ are
fallable just like
any one else.
For example, the duplication of effort in both the IGI and temple work.
My father submitted work
for a realtive back in the 1970's that has been done 9 times since, and
in all those cases, some of
the information is wrong or missing. Is the Church addressing this? Yes,
finally. Pres. Hinckley
found it important enough to announce it during conference. Will they
succeed? Eventually, but
don't hold your breath. It's a simple problem to comprehend, but it's
the issue of scalability that
gives it a new dimension beyond what they've dealt with before. So, it
will take some study, and
some politicing and the usual mating elephant dance before we see
anything. That's the way of
things.
If they offer an API - take it for what's it worth and do something
useful, but don't expect it to
be around forever. Software is mearly a work in progress. It is never
really "done".
...Paul
Alan Young wrote:
I think figuring out the specifics of the interface is the easy
part. The more difficult issue, and the one that is going to take
some time, is data protection/privacy.
This is why I think its a good thing (in the case of the church, or
*any* agency controlling sensitive data) that the church takes forever
to change. I mean, look at how long it took them to get into
computers at all. But when they did, they didn't have to worry about
the Y2K bug because they took the time to do it right.
--
Alan
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