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I'm one of the culprits who created this problem. I used to write those programs back in the '60s and '70s and was so proud of the fact that I was able to squeeze a few elements of space out of my program by not having to put 1-9 before the year. And back then it was very important. We used to spend a lot of time running through various mathematical exercises before we started to write our programs so that they could be very clearly delimited with respect to space and the use of capacity. It never entered our minds that those programs would have lasted more than a few years. And as a consequence, they are very poorly documented. If I were to go back and look at some of the programs I wrote 30 years ago, I mean, I would have one terribly difficult time working my way through step by step. And to try to infer how one reads a program when there are lots of alternate ways of doing things, and all you've got is the code in front of you, is not simple. It, therefore, is a very -- it's a very difficult problem to get your hands around.... The trouble is that there is a perversity of incentive in this type of problem in that you can be extremely scrupulous in going through every single line of code in all of your computer operations, make all the adjustments that are required, and get essentially a system, whether you're a bank or an industrial corporation, and say, "We've solved the 2000 problem" and then find that when the date arrives, all of the interconnects that are now built-in start to break down.... So part of what we're trying to do is figure out what we can do to assuage whatever problems might arise. And it's a difficult exercise because there's such a huge element of uncertainty in the nature of the problem itself. But we're trying to come to grips with it as best we can. - Alan Greenspan, February 25, 1998 |
