Hi Ron, I fall on the other side of the Y2K line, especially regarding Japan. Here's why:
The Japanese were relatively late at incorporating computing into their businesses. They are significantly behind the West, still. This provides a two-sided advantage from a Y2K perspective. First and foremost, their computing engines could not have reached the level of control and essentiality that they have here in the States. Also by starting late, they avoided much of the early computing engines that were not Y2K compliant.
Just for fun, I reset the clock on my other computer here on my desk (again) just now. I cranked it to 11:59PM 12/31/1999 and let it rip. Crossed over just fine. Thinks its early on the first day of the last year of the millennium - 01/01/2000, no smoke. Let me describe the system - IBM/PC 386/33 (that's 33 Mhz). So early 90s vintage. The BIOS is Phoenix Tech BIOS Version 1.00-0107 Ref 06. (Whatever that means). With a copyright dated 1984-1991. So there again an early 90s reference. The BIOS has never been upgraded since I bought the system new.
So if an early 1990s 386 can handle the Y2K issue at the BIOS level fine, then we are really narrowing this to really vintage PCs most all of which are now collecting dust somewhere. I seriously doubt that the Japanese, with their penchant to tweak, tune, modify and improve things would still be running any enterprise critical functions on 286s or earlier systems.
If an essential machine does act up, I would bet there will be someone assigned to be standing by looking for that particular system to fail, and maybe even anticipating a problem, have a contingency plan in place to resolve it. I know I will be called upon for just such duty, come the 31st.
One system that I have had responsibility for, runs some diffusion furnaces in a fab. Our resolution after exploring all sorts of options is to simply crank back the clock, for the remaining life of the equipment. Because it is such old obsolete stuff, its not integrated with any sophisticated data collection or transference hardware. Its a standalone system, so if we just agree that the time be set back 1 or 2 or 5 or any number of years it will continue running just fine. Not a big deal really, just have to train 5 or 10 people in this date anomaly and learn to live with an offset.
This does not in anyway absolve the software writers nor the users who have built elaborate spreadsheets or user level code, from resolving that their respective code is compliant. But here again, the late start by the Japanese means less code to clean.
However, all that being said, I don't think the Japanese have figured out how to get out of their banking/loan problem, and I don't see them leading Asia out of the slump.
See you after the GREAT DIVIDE!<g>
Regards, Mike |
