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From: bruce@ISM780.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.bugs
Subject: Re: Computer bugs in the year 2000
Message-ID: <72@ISM780.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 30-Jan-85 01:22:01 EST
Article-I.D.: ISM780.72
Posted: Wed Jan 30 01:22:01 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 2-Feb-85 14:20:34 EST
Lines: 20
Nf-ID: #R:reed:-82000:ISM780:15400003:000:1229
Nf-From: ISM780!bruce    Jan 29 02:00:00 1985

>       From what I've read, many programs broke at the start of 1970
>       because they stored the year as a single digit; fewer, but still a
>       good number, broke in 1980.
Not as well known is the fact that many COBOL banking and/or accounting
programs that broke in 1970 were fixed by allowing the year field to be
interpreted as a binary field rather than a decimal field. This was
intended as a temporary measure until the database records could be
reorganized with a wider date field.  (When you've got several million
records and several hundred programs, adding just one byte to each record
takes a bit of doing and most records have more than one date field.) Many
of those same systems broke again at the beginning of 1976. I recall that
when I started working for Western Bancorp in Sept. 1976 that some of my
co-workers were nine months later still regaling each other with tales of
which banks got caught by that one. I seriously plan on closing my
checking account several months before the end of the centuary and hiding
all my cash under my mattress until all the smoke clears.

Bruce Adler                 {sdcrdcf,uscvax,ucla-vax,vortex}!ism780!bruce
Interactive Systems Corp.   decvax!yale-co!ima!bruce