On the one hand, I agree that a lot of the Y2K scare was based on ignorance and hype, and most of the scary scenarios were really unlikely.
Maybe so, but explanations about some of the scenarios were believable.
On the other hand, I think that the reason it turned out to be such a non-event is that enough people (like us) took it seriously enough to fix the problems we thought really existed. We did our job, it worked, and the result is thta nothing happened.
I changed a little more than one hundred PF's, recompiled some three to
four hundred LF's, made changes to six or seven hundred RPG programs,
and a few CL's. A lot of keys had dates (they're always searching
dates). And that was with a whole of files already at seven digits. Had
to review a lot more for the date files. Set up sets of a few related
PF's with dependent LF's to change at once, but converted most of it in
one swoop in production (too many inter-dependencies to make sense
otherwise).
January 1 came smooth, but at the first A/R processing all the old data
disappeared; I missed that one RPG or something.
IMHO, to say that all that effort wasn't necessary is like saying that we don't need air traffic controllers -- after all, airplanes almost never crash into each other, so what's the problem?
Some of these things you have to watch the news real close and real fast
as things happen, because it goes away in the media. I heard something
about a safety mechanism failing in a nuclear plant in Japan that kicked
in another safety flag. There were reports of ATM's in Britain that were
also malfunctioning due to the date. The power went out here in Miami
Florida right at midnight (at least in all my neighborhood).
Then again, pretty much all has been quiet. Not absolutely, but overall? Y2K was a non-event
I think it was because it was the only Information Technology project in
business history that was properly budgeted and supported completely and
patiently by those who controlled the budgets. If this were always the
case for IT/IS, I think we would always come up roses like this.
- Alan
