[OP]
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I was on call.
I worked in IT.
Only one call came in near midnight. It was from the Ohio Lottery. I called them to see what the problem was, but, the person that placed the after hours holiday emergency call ($250) had left ang gone home.
Whoopee!!! I made an easy $50 just for taking that call.
Looking back on Y2K....
"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." - John Lennon
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I was doing systems engineering and change control. We watched what happened in Australia, then had a party that night.
I was also on call.
1999 was a banner year in I.T. Some genius got the story (which is true in many cases) rolling. Neckties around conference tables understood little of "that computer stuff" and made blanket decisions. We flew all over the country certifying equipment as Y2K compliant. We were honest with our customer base when they wanted equipment certified that couldn't have been effected. Trying to explain things to most folks triggered the onset of MEGLO (my eye glaze over) and we would finish the conversation with nothing changed. The blanket ruling (the easy decision for the lazy) was that ALL I.T. hardware be certified. Between this and the already rolling internet explosion it was a great time to be a geek.
I don't remember ever not being on call . . . even when I wasn't on call
"A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg".
– Samuel Butler
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Yep. I was a programmer that could "do" COBOL. Does that show my age? I wrote code during most of 1999 to update old code that prefixed dates with the 19. Some people still wanted me to just change it to prefix with the "20". I tried in vain to get them to let me adjust it to a four position year. Of course, I imagine most of that code is long gone now.
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Was working in this basement in 1999- just like this very minute, and, 2019, 2009, 1989, 1979
For Xmas that year some friends gave us this countdown clock:
Y2k clock.jpg
It's been counting up ever since. I just took this pic, had to find the thing-- IIRC we had to change the batteries when we moved into our mobile home, that was 2009, it's still running on those batteries- actual time on my watch said 1:48 when I took this pic, so it's picked up an hour and 5 minutes in 12 years. Guess that's not TOO bad, just changed out an alarm clock that was gaining over a minute per week...
Time, what a concept...
========================================
ELEVEN - rotary cutter tool machines
FOUR - CO2 lasers
THREE- make that FOUR now- fiber lasers
ONE - vinyl cutter
CASmate, Corel, Gravostyle
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Not necessarily. I read that there's more COBOL running than one might think doing jobs that if it fails would make the news.Originally Posted by Lisa Starr
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I had been scrambling for weeks updating software between multiple CT and MR scanners at several surrounding hospitals and clinics. Being in a remote area, I waited for the calls to come but the only one I got was because an institution lost power and the backup generator failed. The techs wanted to know where the breakers were on some of the x-ray equipment.
Ken
So much to learn, so little time.....
Contributor
I have a friend who learned COBOL in the military, and became a programmer for Bank of America. He worked for them for years, then switched to doing projects on a series of 9 month contracts. A few years ago, he told me that Bank of America commisioned a feasibility study of converting all their COBOL based systems to something newer. The projected cost was over 1 trillion dollars. So, Bank of America will be on COBOL systems for eternity and there will always be a need for COBOL programmers.
Contributor
Are you sure that is not supposed to be $1 billion? $1 trillion would cover close to five million man years of work at $200,000 per worker.
Contributor
If you took the total number of lines of COBOL in BofA's inventory and threw that number as a single project against the COCOMO estimation model, I don't think millions of person-years is at all out of the question. That might be a truly stupid way to handle the study, but then again, the people generating the estimate do have a vested interest in a "Big Number" answer.
(I'm a big fan of comedy in the workplace, so the first question to the powers-that-be would be, "What replacement language did you have in mind?" Second question would be, "Where do y'all keep the requirements documentation?")
Yoga class makes me feel like a total stud, mostly because I'm about as flexible as a 2x4.
"Design"? Possibly. "Intelligent"? Sure doesn't look like it from this angle.
We used to be hunter gatherers. Now we're shopper borrowers.
The three most important words in the English language: "Front Towards Enemy".
The world makes a lot more sense when you remember that Butthead was the smart one.
You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much ammo.
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I don't think it's all that out of line. I used to write COBAL, and APL, for the same reasons... I'm nowhere close to retirement age. It's not just the banks either. Pretty much any large, older, enterprise would be similar.
~mike
happy in my mud hut
Contributor
I remember taking my 1922 Model 'T' hot rod to a big car show (L. A. Roadsters) in 1999, and putting a Y2K compliant sign on it. Got a few smiles.
Rick Potter
DIY journeyman,
FWW wannabe.
AKA Village Idiot.
Contributor
That is a truly terrifying combination of skills.
Yoga class makes me feel like a total stud, mostly because I'm about as flexible as a 2x4.
"Design"? Possibly. "Intelligent"? Sure doesn't look like it from this angle.
We used to be hunter gatherers. Now we're shopper borrowers.
The three most important words in the English language: "Front Towards Enemy".
The world makes a lot more sense when you remember that Butthead was the smart one.
You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much ammo.
Contributor
... it also makes me feel so much older than I am.That is a truly terrifying combination of skills.
Both predate my birth
~mike
happy in my mud hut
Contributor
No, it was $1 Trillion. If it was only a billion it would probably be done by now. Bank of Americal had a net income of $17.9 billion for the fiscal year 2020, according to their annual report.
That $1 trillion figure is the total estimated cost, which includes all hardware, software, programming, data conversion and employee training. I also assume it factors in downtime and lost productivity, as there would likely be times that their main system would be down. They would want to minimize that, as they are a worldwide operation that runs 24/7/365. There would need to be huge amounts of testing and redundancy in any changeover/upgrade. It would also take a long time, maybe a decade, to complete. Absolutely huge project.
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