To: John Lister who wrote (1287 ) 3/24/1998 9:51:00 PM From: E.H.F. Read Replies (3) | Respond to
I have a friend who works with EDS. Just ran into him today and he told me that his office is working on 8 Y2K problems right now, and that that is expected to increase with time. The real culprit is COBOL, an old language that's been around forever and is still in use by many businesses. To fix the problem you have to go through millions of (for the big companies) lines of code and recode the date variable with an updated version of COBOL (that's compliant) so you can do things like recognize four digit years and and do math with it. There are software programs that hunt out the code. Probably many companies are just going to update their hardware and software, which will be a boon to the PC companies. Fixing the problem is really an easy task...it's just the sheer number of systems and the time clock that makes it difficult. I expect the vast majority of systems to get it in high gear this year, and I expect very little if any disruption of anything. But the vast majority of people, not knowing anything at all about computers, are going to get scared...especially if the news slants to the doom and gloom, which I also expect. I won't BS anyone into thinking that all hell is going to break loose...I couldn't do that in good conscience. But that won't matter anyway, because the voices of reason will be drowned out by the prophets of doom. At the very least I expect people to pare down some of their stock holdings, and assuming that not all of their money is going to be tucked under their mattresses or burried in the backyard, that means that some of it will find its way into banks. That's why I bought WES, a bank that's growing, and which in my mind is a good investment in its own right.
