Computer bugs in the year 2000

[bruce at ISM780.UUCP]

>       From what I've read, many programs broke at the start of 1970
>       because they stored the year as a single digit; fewer, but still a
>       good number, broke in 1980.
Not as well known is the fact that many COBOL banking and/or accounting
programs that broke in 1970 were fixed by allowing the year field to be
interpreted as a binary field rather than a decimal field. This was
intended as a temporary measure until the database records could be
reorganized with a wider date field.  (When you've got several million
records and several hundred programs, adding just one byte to each record
takes a bit of doing and most records have more than one date field.) Many
of those same systems broke again at the beginning of 1976. I recall that
when I started working for Western Bancorp in Sept. 1976 that some of my
co-workers were nine months later still regaling each other with tales of
which banks got caught by that one. I seriously plan on closing my
checking account several months before the end of the centuary and hiding
all my cash under my mattress until all the smoke clears.

Bruce Adler                 {sdcrdcf,uscvax,ucla-vax,vortex}!ism780!bruce
Interactive Systems Corp.   decvax!yale-co!ima!bruce