Routine that became a meltdown
<< A ROUTINE Friday afternoon batch job turned into disaster when a computer meltdown brought a manufacturing system to its knees.
The computer room was humming, and all systems were go for one of Australia's largest manufacturers.
Then Jeff Steel, project manager of Infact Consultants, reset the system clock to January 7, 2000, and waited to see what would happen.
The routine batch job, which involved 800 custom-built Cobol and PL-1 programs in a manufacturing mainframe environment, was expected to take six hours to run.
Close by, a terminal in the control room was set up to track the programs as they went through the batch run.
Although he anticipated some problems, Steel was not prepared for anything coming out of left field.
His team of 12 programmers had worked methodically for nine months, manually sifting through millions of lines of code, rectifying the double digit issue to take account of the year 2000.
Great care had been taken to keep the crew motivated and focused on the their tasks to ensure time was spent productively and any reworking was kept to a minimum.
At worst, he expected to make some specific changes that could be easily spotted.
Operations had hardly begun before the first programs started to run slowly.
By the time the sixth program started, the system began to falter. Then, one after another, programs fell over.
... more ... >>
theaustralian.com.au
A view from down under.
:-))
|
