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Technology Stocks : Discuss Year 2000 Issues -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Mansfield who wrote (589)	11/30/1997 8:20:00 AM
From: John Mansfield	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 9818

The Future History of Y2K - Fleshing out the outline From c.s.year-2000 by jim Rivera; posted on 28 June 1997 You can find the complete posting by searching ww.dejanews.com. -------- Jim Rivera: "This is an attempt to get a handle on what might happen as The Day approaches and passes. Look at it as an outline for a science-fiction story (I have been re-reading some of Heinlein's works recently). Specifically I am going to outline, roughly and extremely imprecisely, what the world might look like as we approach The Day. Since this is the Y2K _software_ newsgroup, I am going to discuss the implications of the situation for people like us, software professionals. Note that this is an unashamedly US-centric forecast-it's the only place where I feel confident preparing even a fuzzy forecast. This is an outline that tracks the following factors: Overall business activity Stock market index (Dow Jones or similar) Number of effective organizations Demand for software workers Social chaos index (higher is more chaotic) Public awareness of the Y2K situation COBOL programmer pay rate, per hour This is what I would consider a surprise-free projection, I am going to assume one good surprise and one bad surprise. The following assumptions are used in this model: Denial will persist for a while yet The US won't get around to fixing things until after the 1998 elections. We get one major bad surprise and one good law will be passed. Some of you may think that this is a mild forecast of the consequences of the Y2K problem. But consider the following points in support of that view: The economy is strong and unemployment is very low The budget deficit is low The national mood is sunny Our rate of introducing new technology has been good for the past few years Many companies are good at managing change, something that will be very valuable in the near future As a result I feel that mild optimism is in order. The projection starts on the fourth quarter of this year, all parameters except public awareness & programmer rate are normalized to 100. Awareness is always in percent of the whole. The snapshot is taken once at the beginning of each calendar quarter. The COBOL programmer index is really an index for all IT workers in general, it's just that there are more COBOL workers than others so it makes sense to track this rate. A warning: I am not an economist, I have just read a lot of SF and history. Some of my numbers are out of a hat. This is a fleshing out of a severity 4 Y2K crunch. Note there are things in this forecast I haven't seen elsewhere, so let the games begin. .... (previous quarters - JM) ... 1998-Q2 Business activity 107 Stock market 102 and unstable Effective organizations 104 Demand for software workers 175 Social chaos index 105 Public awareness of the Y2K situation 20% COBOL programmer rate $175 This is the quarter that most people will think of as "the beginning of THOSE interesting times" The overall tone in the US starts to get a little wild. The stock market begins to notice that all is not right with American businesses. Y2K costs and diversion of resources begin to eat into US business profits. Lou Rukeyser devotes a quarter of every program to Y2K issues. CEOs are now panicking. Congress is holding hearings regularly on Y2K. Bill Clinton makes speeches about Y2K. == 1998-Q3 Business activity 106 Stock market 82 and jittery Effective organizations 102 Demand for software workers 250 Social chaos index 108 Public awareness of the Y2K situation 45% COBOL programmer rate $225 ... (skipped some quarters; is interesting reading though!) 1999-Q3 Business activity 84 Stock market 62 and watchful Effective organizations 88 Public awareness of the Y2K situation 98% Demand for software workers 450 Social chaos index 140 COBOL programmer rate $425 As more and more businesses with non-compliant software get absorbed, the rates for COBOL workers finally stabilize. Some more companies start to say that they are compliant and can prove it. It's a long hot summer in the cities. One large company moves all its IS workers into a motel so that the programmers can enjoy a 100-foot commute to their offices in the next wing with breakfast catered at their desks. -------- This scenario goes on until 2001

To: John Mansfield who wrote (589)	12/5/1997 12:29:00 PM
From: John Mansfield	Respond to of 9818

The '1972 fix' is not a viable solution for the vast majority of embedded systems. From: year2000.unt.edu ; Topic 11 (Infrastructure, PCs, & embedded systems); conversation 2 (you have to log in; but it is free). ------ 47. Author: Peter Quinn ( peterquinn ) Date: Nov. 25 10:59 AM 1997 I have noticed that turning the clock back 28 years for embedded systems has been mentioned. Why 28 years? Is this the earliest valid leap year? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 48. Author: Bruce Hevner ( aceracer ) Date: Nov. 25 12:58 AM 1997 No it's because the days of the week are the same as 2000. But this won't work with PC's. DOS starts keeping time with 1-1-1980. Trying to use a date earlier than 1980 will cause DOS to display an error code of 1-4-1980. Which means you should reset the date. Sounded SO easy didn't it? I Wish! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 49. Author: Geoffrey Jahnke ( geoffrey ) Date: Nov. 25 3:08 PM 1997 The '1972 fix' is not a viable solution for the vast majority of embedded systems. One of the reasons for this was mentioned by Bruce, many systems will not go back any further than 04 Jan 80. This has also been demonstrated in some shop floor equipment as well as DOS systems. A major reason that this is not a viable solution is the mismatch with other infrastructure running with its date in the year 2000. Between embedded controllers this would cause a great deal of problems. Take a process controller with the date 01/05/2000 and a PLC with the date 01/05/1972 for instance, the PLC will attempt to synchronize its date with the supervisory controller. When it detects the large discrepancy there is a good chance that PLC will either enter into gross control failure or enter an infinite synchronization loop . The date mismatch would also present a problem when an embedded controller is used in conjunction with a business system. If a PLC in 01/05/1972 was using a network connection to log its process into a mainframe database, this would present quite a problem. More COBOL programmers would be required to add the additional date transition algorithm. Also data printed would have a higher degree of ambiguity. Looking back at hard-copy records, data stamped 1/5/72 could be confused with the data actually from 1972, where as most humans would not confuse data time stamped 00 with data from 1900. GeoffJahnke Deere&Company