Huntsville Times: Year-end Stock Listings from Associated Press Messed Up

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We had precautions to protect our printing process, we had a plan to reflect life as it was at the close of the 20th century, we had special deadlines, we had a terrific buffet to feed hungry staffers who were working rather than celebrating. The planning worked. We had power, we had fine stories, we had fast and excellent work by reporters and photographers and editors ...

We did not, we discovered as 1999 morphed into 2000, have the year-end stock listings from the Associated Press in readable form. We had missing information, bad information, garbled information and nothing at all like the perfect test pages we'd received and downloaded weeks earlier.

The result in the New Year's Day paper was pretty much a mess, over five pages intended to give investors a definitive look at stocks' and mutual funds' performance for the year. We reran the whole thing, right, on Saturday, as I hope you saw.

It certainly wasn't Y2 anything. More like Why, Lord?

http://www.al.com/columnists/huntsville/jdistelheim/01092000-e10199.html

THE HUNTSVILLE [ALABAMA] TIMES - January 9, 1999

-- Cheryl (Ckufta@Internetcds.com), January 09, 2000

Answers

Hi

I would dispute this as "not a y2k problem" until proven otherwise.

There are three kinds of y2k problems:

(1) Those that are directly "century date change" related (thanks to Mr. Greenspan for the CDC concept :-))

(2) Those that happen because systems that are not really ready are forced into service early before they are fully tested/shaken down; e.g., Hershey's, Atlanta Building Permits

(3) Those that happen because you were so focused on y2k you missed a glitch you would otherwise have caught. There will be many of these.

This is an example of #3

-- Bud Hamilton (budham@hotmail.com), January 09, 2000.


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