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Technology Stocks : Y2K (Year 2000) Stocks: An Investment Discussion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jeffrey S. Mitchell who wrote (8314)	12/11/1997 9:41:00 PM
From: David Eddy	Respond to of 13949

Jeff - Many old computer software programs that recognize dates in two digit formats - "97" would represent 1997 - will run awry after the stroke of midnight in the year 2000. Point of order!! I know this is just a cut & paste from a newspaper, but... I was talking to a Y2K project manager today at a manufacturing facility. Their BOM (bill-of-materials) system has just gone back into production & is running ok (so far with only a few small hiccups). He pointed out that early on they determined that this system's "drop dead" date is 1/1/98, since it looks forward into the future a full two years. Also on the other side, they won't be fully out of the woods until 1/1/01 since the system also looks backwards a full year. Point being: the world doesn't simple STOP on 1/1/00... most big, operational systems have a variety of "critical event windows" that will begin to crop up in increasing intensity & density as we APPROACH 1/1/00. The really tricky part is that unless you know the interdependancies of your systems & subsystems really well, the main system can be chugging merrily along just fine, but some "small" auxiliary system can be getting spurious results that may now show up until months later... prime example being the story in today's (12/11/97, B1) WSJ on Oxford Health care. [Executives..."weren't getting the statistics and data they needed to make accurate estimates on future liabilities" (sic)] He also stated that they have already planned to have their mainframe turned off at the end of 12/31/99 and then turn it on again on 1/1/00. Re-IPLing (reboot for small box folks) a mainframe is a nontrivial task that can take a considerable amount of time. - David