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To: John Carragher who wrote (2252)	2/3/1999 9:05:00 PM
From: Toby Zidle	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 17683

A few observations from some of this afternoon's postings on the E-Trade computer system failure: It also a disgrace that they are advertising for more and more customers and they can't serve those of us on line now. Doesn't this sound like America Online a year or two ago? That situation cost AOL big-time with state Attorneys General. Will EGRP be called to account in the same way? [Probably not.] It all depends on how you define 'simultaneously'. This has eluded lawyers and politicians for many a month. When is 'is' is and when is 'is' ain't? Whoever the genius was that made the change probably didn't think it was his fault - and it took them several hours to make the determination that indeed it was the change in program code that caused the failure. They should have just brought the system back to the way it was before they made the change, but they probably tried to fix the problem on the fly and it failed again. -Put it back the way it was before it went wrong.- A perfectly good layman suggestion, but for all practical purposes impossible to implement. If you backed up the programming and data nanoseconds before the changeover, you might just restore the system and be ok. BUT if anything at all happened between backup and changeover [which is certainly the case if your software engineers keep the system up and phase in the change], you've screwed yourself royally. Confirmed trades didn't happen. Statement accounts can't be reconciled. Etc., etc. Besides, software routines are so interdependent that it will literally take hours to debug. Sort of like a brain transplant where all the logic points need to be tested. One thing EGRP can be faulted for is doing this during a live trading session instead of on a weekend when they could have run a simulated session and seen that there were severe problems.