Pythonic Y2K

[Larry Martell]

On Fri, Jan 18, 2019 at 10:43 AM Michael Torrie <torriem at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 01/16/2019 12:02 PM, Avi Gross wrote:
> > I recall the days before the year 2000 with the Y2K scare when people
> > worried that legacy software might stop working or do horrible things once
> > the clock turned. It may even have been scary enough for some companies to
> > rewrite key applications and even switch from languages like COBOL.
>
> Of course it wasn't just a scare.  The date rollover problem was very
> real. It's interesting that now we call it the Y2K "scare" and since
> most things came through that okay we often suppose that the people who
> were warning about this impending problem were simply being alarmist and
> prophets of doom.  We often deride them.  But the fact is, people did
> take these prophets of doom seriously and there was a massive, even
> heroic effort, to fix a lot of these critical backend systems so that
> disaster was avoided (just barely).  I'm not talking about PCs rolling
> over to 00.  I'm talking about banking software, mission critical
> control software.  It certainly was scary enough for a lot of companies
> to spend a lot of money rewriting key software.  The problem wasn't with
> COBOL necessarily.

I had one client, a hedge fund, that I fixed literally 1000's of Y2K
issues for. When Y2K came and there were no problems, the owner said
to me "You made such a big deal about the Y2K thing, and nothing
happened."