Quote:
Originally Posted by Solecismic
I never understood the Y2K issue. I remember assuring people it would be a big nothing-burger - that all the code that stored year as two digits didn't amount to that much. Every bank had years to work it out, so the most we could expect is possibly an automated bill from somewhere that didn't make sense and could easily be resolved.
I told people it was code when the UNIX-based time structure (long since replaced at this point) wraps around sometime on January 19, 2038 that we had to worry about, and by then, it won't be much of an issue, either.
The non-leap year in 2100, however... that will screw people up.
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My concern regarding non-airline systems were a bunch of old COBOL programmers brought back into the fold (COBOL was far along on being ancient) to fix 2 digit years etc. At that time, I heard concerns about financial reports being mis-reported, payroll being wrong (big, big thing) and like.
Regarding airline systems, I assume most reservations were from the old SABRE code which I think was in the Assembly language. But the big one was the Air Traffic Control which I assume is also written in a low level language (e.g. not COBOL). I have to believe "time/duration calculations" are integral to those systems, and hence the concern for Y2K.