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Strategies & Market Trends : Waiting for the big Kahuna

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To: Bonnie Bear who wrote (15528)	4/5/1998 4:05:00 PM
From: paulmcg0	Read Replies (1) of 94695

[I think IBM may be the mother of all y2K companies] No offense Bonnie, but I blame IBM for a lot of the Y2K problems. For example: data from old applications was often stored on punched cards that stored 80 bytes. When hard disks became widespread, IBM changed their operating systems so that software that used cards would write 80 byte records on the hard drive. Voila! Ancient applications continued to work. Of course, having only 80 bytes in a record meant that programmers had to be compact in their coding (using 2 digits for the year) and they had to take advantage of other IBM mainframe "features". One of these features was a data type that stored a digit (from 0 to 9) as 4 bits (binary coded decimal) so that a single byte could hold a value between 00 and 99. Guess what was used in dates, and how difficult it will be to find and fix? Particularly if the source code can't be located? I guess that IBM thought it was doing its customers a favor by letting the oldest software keep running with each new generation of technology, with no changes required to the software, but now, it leads to serious problems because nothing has ever been updated. Paul M.

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