To: John Mansfield who wrote (6695 ) 7/18/1999 10:56:00 AM From: C.K. Houston Read Replies (1) | Respond to
Here's another in-depth and fascinating article on the "Y2K blame game". Amazed me that the first investigative reporting on this issue came from, of all places, Vanity Fair Magazine.How all this happened is an unlikely story, and it begins nearly a half-century ago with a most unlikely woman. Her name was Grace Murray Hopper, and in the field of computer science there has seldom been her like. Feisty, quick tongued, and irreverent ("Life was simple before World War II," she liked to say, "after that, we had systems"), 'Amazing Grace," as colleagues called her, racked up many distinctions during her 85-year life. They included coining the phrase "computer bug" (a moth flew into one she was working on) ; becoming the first female admiral in the navy; and inventing the "compiler"-the software element that translates text into the is and Os a computer can understand. But the accomplishment for which Grace Hopper is best remembered was helping to create a computer code actually useful in everyday life. Its name was common business-oriented language-COBOL, for short ...For as was disturbingly becoming apparent, "COBOL Cowboys," as rough-and-ready programmers called themselves, had worked according to whim , sometimes deliberately hiding dates (as this guaranteed they'd later need to be hired back), other times disguising them under the names of girlfriends, cars, even Star Trek characters (because this was thought idiosyncratic and amusing). Thus, "2000 - 1983 = 17" might read as "Gloria + Chevy = Spock." Not that the code needed to be so complicated.In 1997 the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services discovered that many of its computer functions were being governed by one word: "Bob." ...wild2k.com 166 Days until 2000
