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

To: E.H.F. who wrote (1313)	3/26/1998 12:56:00 AM
From: Hawkmoon	Respond to of 9818

E.H.F, Again, I wish to step in and call you on this. The Y2K problem exists as a result of money driven business decisions made long ago. Storage was EXTREMELY expensive and every little character truncated added to the literal Billions of $$$ that went to the bottom lines of companies buying large mainframe and record storage systems. Y2K exists not only with COBOL, but with FORTRAN, JOVIAL, ADA, and a whole host of poorly written applications using these languages, which are not to blame as mentioned above. The blame is upon the IT management staff and indirectly the programmers who did what they were told to do; keep costs down by eliminating any extraneous data they could. And while not a programmer myself, I remember struggling through BASIC/PASCAL 101 and watching with amazement at the computer labs while COBOL students spent hours attempting to debug their programs. Seems some of them might have one mistake that would cause a dozen errors to show up when it was compiled. That's when I decided that obtaining a BA might be more prudent for my skill levels. Regards, Ron

To: E.H.F. who wrote (1313)	3/26/1998 1:04:00 AM
From: John Mansfield	Respond to of 9818

Dear EHF, << The fact still remains that most of the problems lie with systems using the Cobol code, whether you want to call it the culprit or victim. >> Please get some figures about the relative sizes of the problem in programs implemented in different languages (before making statements such as above 'most of the problems'). You can get these figures from e.g. the well known study of Capers-Jones; www.spr.com. In this study you will also see that he only regarded in his quantifications y2k in IT; not in non-IT (i.e. embedded systems). Regards, John

To: E.H.F. who wrote (1313)	3/26/1998 7:42:00 AM
From: David Eddy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9818

E.H.F. - The fact still remains that most of the problems lie with systems using the Cobol code In fact no one really knows. A core problem with Y2K is that no one really has a handle on what it is we're attempting to count. What's "a system"? Not a simple answer. Could be a single spreadsheet. Could be thousands of programs/modules. By single language, yes COBOL is probably greatest by volume, but there are probably hundreds of dialects of COBOL alone. Then you get into the fact that there are hundreds of languages in active use... Assembler, Focus, DYL260, Natural, M204, IMS, CICS, xBase, & on & on. Factoid: 12,000 IBM mainframes 40,000 IBM DOS/VSE midrange 400,000 IBM AS400 midrange 400,000 DEC (remember them?) VAX midrange not to mention Prime, Wang, Data General, Datapoint, Control Data, Hewlett-Packard, AT&T, etc., etc. Saying "COBOL is the culprit" is grossly over simplifying the issue. The culprit is management negligence. - David