I'm thinking he actually did buy into the fear mongering and Y2K hype.
I think he did too. And yet....
Y2K was different from a situation where, say, tonight at midnight we stumbled into its equivalent with no warning . That could be disaster. We could see Y2K coming a loooooong ways away.
And because if that we could prepare for it, mitigate it, fix it. And I think that's what Greenie didn't take proper account of that. (The problems to fear are the ones you don't or can't anticipate (of course, how can you fear them since you can't see them coming, so be happy!) The ones that can be seen are fixed or mitigated by the time they hit.)
Plus the fact that its "fixers" HUGELY exaggerated the problem for their own benefit. Countries that spent little or nothing on fixing Y2K had few or no problems. And they generally had the oldest code and oldest machines. They used them in fewer applications, but they did use them, and in important applications like airport radars, etc.
I helped put some Y2K bugs in, I'm sure, although I doubt that any code I wrote in the '70s and 80's was still running at Y2K. Back then memory and disk space was precious and saving a couple of bytes on date formats was just good practice. It could mean the difference between a program that could be run and one that couldn't because it was too big. But we knew that this would be a probelm if done around the year 2000. |
