Hi Antoine,
>> What do you believe the evening news will look like on Jan 1, 2000? <<
I have no idea. However, I do expect the stock market computers to survive.
By the way, the Y2K problem may appear at times other than 1/1/2000. The earliest real Y2K problem I've seen occurred on first few months of 1970. A bank in New York had a program that listed all active mortgage accounts every month and this listing was used to manually issue bills (amazing, hand processed billings). Well, the new 30 year mortgages set up on January of 1970 had final payment due, of course, on January of 2000 and these account information were squeezed into 80 column punch card with termination date as 0100. You can probably guess what happened, the program calculated number of remaining payments by subtracting current date from the termination date and if the difference is greater than 0 the account was listed as active, otherwise the account was listed as pending closure on another listing. New mortgage holders, concerned about not getting any bills, called the bank only to find that their accounts were already closed. The first time they fixed the bug, they inserted code to disallow negative numbers. This caused another problem when the calculated negative values were treated as positive; the new mortgage holders now had 65535 months of mortgage payments. The codes were written in strange mixture of COBOL and NCR assembler.
Other documented Y2K problem that have already occurred include some prisoners sentenced to be released on year 2000 or greater were released because years remaining is reported as negative.
Anyway, if the stock market hasn't crashed by 01012000 I probably will be shorting some of overconfident companies. Do you know any candidates?
NI |
