Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:
Take the Y2K problem. As I said before, it was quite real. It was a
financial disaster. Society was forced to spend billions of dollars in
emergency repairs that should have been taken care of cheaply during
routing maintenance 20 years earlier.
I disagree. When you talk about "routine maintenance" in this context I
think you are imagining a world that did not exist.
I was programming computers in 1978, and I assure you, 90% of the work was
routing maintenance of existing COBOL programs. I wrote many date routines,
such as input and Julian date conversions, and I made darn sure they would
work past the year 2000. In many industries year-2000 dates were already in
use. For example banks had records of 20- and 30-year mortgages and leases,
which terminated after 2000.
The Y2K problems were entirely, or almost entirely, software problems.
There were entirely software problems. I have never heard of a hardwired
date routine.
"20 years earlier" than year 2000 was year 1980. Remember what things
were like? A typical personal computer was still an Apple ][ -- the Lisa
(remember the Lisa?)
Personal computers have nothing to do with this problem. Most of them were
fixed in the 1990s at little or no expense. In any programming language or
system developed after 1990 it would have been difficult to cause a Y2K
problem. You would have to write your own date routines instead of using
the prepackaged ones, and you have to be both incompetent and inventive,
because the routines in programming books included year-2000 features. Some
of them worked for thousands of years in either direction, as I recall.
They were used for astronomy and archaeology.
Now, what "routine maintenance" was going on in the software world?
Darn little, because almost nothing was "routine" in those days.
EVERYTHING was routine! It was so predictable, I could write manuals
blindfolded, and figure out most of the program by glancing at the data
structures.
The only established software base with anything like a "routine"
associated with it was the IBM mainframe world, where the universe still
ran on COBOL and PL/1.
In 1980 trillions of dollars of commerce in the US ran on COBOL. A huge
chunk still does. Actually, COBOL is a lot better for business apps than
C++, in my opinion. C++ is the third most popular language, and COBOL is
#13, but it is gaining.
Most of our software today seems to be written in C. Remember C in
1980? 6 character variable names on globals (that's right, just six) . . .
Yup. A real nightmare. That's why I preferred COBOL or Pascal.
large C program to work _at_ _all_ was a major challenge in those days;
worrying about how well it would work 20 years later was totally outside
the picture.
As I said, banking software actually did have to work with Y2K dates back
then. So did computers in many industries with long-term inventory and
projects, such as building houses or bridges, or leasing farm equipment.
Asserting that "routine maintenance" of software in 1980 should have
included fixing Y2K problems is a little absurd, I think.
It did include that, and I personally performed it. This was for things
like municipal billing systems and first generation grocery scanners.
- Jed
