Did anyone make any preparations for the millenium Bug?
I’ve been a COBOL programmer for 30 years. I spent roughly half my work week working on the Y2K bug during 1998 and 3/4ths of my work week working on it in 1999. We didn’t have airplanes falling out of the sky. Our problem was more of the form of invoice history coming up wrong and people getting credit when they should not. Just to take one example, our union employess got “vested” when they had worked 5 years for the company. Someone is hired in 1996. The computer program adds 5 to the hire date to see if he is vested or not. It comes up with 2001, only the field was only two digits, so it got 01, not 2001. It subtracted and got -95, but the field wasn’t signed so it thought he had 95 years of service and was fully vested. To take another example that is probably easier to understand, if you sort invoice history or sales history or any sort of history on the six normal digits of the date, and you had one history record per month you would get: (YY MM DD) 00 01 15 00 02 16 00 03 14 99
