Since the rollover, we've heard from Rick, Drew, the "industry insiders" and many others. But I haven't seen anything from marianne, Bonnie, Jim Smith and others since the rollover...do you have any thoughts you'd like to share?

-- Anonymous, January 16, 2000

Answers

Dan and all,

It's really good to be wrong about some things!

I've been very busy with other things since well before rollover but I can readily admit I was amazed by the lack of problems and by just how far off track I had gone. I didn't go out and buy a gun or move out of town, etc. but, in retrospect I wonder if more than two minutes spent on Y2K wasn't a waste of time?

I'm still digesting this non-event and my involvement in it. It has been strange.

-- Anonymous, January 16, 2000

Steve,

It is my opinion that the risk assesment was so bad, and so far off the mark, by so many orders of magnitude that y2k was in fact a purposeful 'cover their asses' hoax, perpetrated on thinking people by our 'leaders'.

-- Anonymous, January 17, 2000

Initially, it was a totally unknown and un-quantified risk, but as more and more data became available the size of the risk could have been documented and publicized so that, from last summer, enough data was available, at least in this country, which could have been turned into truthful statistics, and instead we got propaganda.

I at times do stastical analysis. If I had an employee performed this way he would have been fired in a minute. Unfortunately, they are our employees - our leaders - we pay our taxes and we buy their goods.

-- Anonymous, January 17, 2000

Change that to 'THEIR' taxes.

-- Anonymous, January 17, 2000

Dan,

I don't know about all the others, but I find it hard *to* think about Y2k in any concrete way. I recently rented a video, The Thirteenth Floor. Try it. I feel like I'm lost in one of their other worlds where things *seem* normal enough, but then again, there are those nagging feelings that something is amiss. Another film to see is The Blair Witch Project. If you didn't know in advance that it was all a fraud, contrived to misdirect your attention, you would buy into the plot completely. Well, maybe not completely, because there were some times when things didn't quite add up. So anyway, there it is. What was that famous statement? A puzzle, inside a mystery, wrapped in an enigma? That's how I feel about the whole Y2k scene.

-- Anonymous, January 18, 2000

Steve: You mentioned that "it's good to be wrong". I didn't really view the whole Y2k situation as a right or wrong thing, although there were some folks firmly entrenched on both sides of the fence. From my perch as an engineer, it was a frontier and a challenge to size up the problem and then go about figuring out how to make a power company get through it without customer outages.

I know it is tempting to say now that any time spent pondering Y2k was a waste, but the prudent thing to do was to try and get educated on the risks, and more importantly, on the likelihood of various problems. Nevertheless, I found your comments thought-provoking.

xBob: Your post-y2k writings have veins of bitterness and frustration that no one gave solid statistics at the time when needed. As others have mentioned, those stats were available through NERC--go back and read any of their 1999 reports to the DOE, and I think you will see, with a post-y2k eye, that they accurately conveyed the test results and risks. The problem is that too many people believed in cover-ups and pre-determined outcomes so that their view of the best available data was quite jaded.

Gordon: I saw the trailors for The Thirteenth Floor, but never saw it...it came out too close to The Matrix. Regarding Blair Witch: At age 17, as I lay in bed unable to sleep as a result of watching The Shining, I made a promise not to pay good $$ to have the crap scared out of me. I have kept that promise with the exception of Scream, which I "had" to see because my son begged me to go.

Anyway, I still liked your Wizard of Oz analogy.

NOW, HAS ANYONE HEARD FROM MARIANNE, JIM SMITH OR BONNIE CAMP LATELY? I'd like to hear from them...

-- Anonymous, January 18, 2000

In early 1997, we started assessing our code base, prodded by a senior manager who was a visionary on this issue, and discovered that in many cases the code was sick, and in some cases, fatally sick -- in other words, beyond timely or cost effective recovery.

So I asked this manager -- whose tireless personal leadership and prodding of upper management got our Y2K project off the ground -- what he thought might happen if much of our code base croaked off.

His response was this: We have but one truly mission-essential business system, payroll. There is but one truly mission-essential infrastructure system, electricity. If both are working after rollover, the rest will eventually get fixed, if it's worth keeping. We are smart enough to get by without a lot of this stuff, if we put our minds to it.

So we identified everything we thought was essential, possibly 15% of the total code base, got that finished on schedule, and then started on the non-essential code base, which is still not complete by any means.

I have to admit that in early 1997, I didn't think much of this manager's seemingly flippant analysis, even though he was the company's Y2K visionary and guru. But so far, his opinions seem to be holding up. The people and the systems are simply more resilient than many of us thought they were. Not to say that we shouldn't remain vigilant, as a matter of simple common sense.

-- Anonymous, January 18, 2000

Hello Scott,

I've been a long time lurker on this forum. As a non-IT person, the bit about Y2K that has been a great puzzle to me is the implication of having failures in non-mission critical systems. Can you tell us what is happening, or is expected to happen, in your firm as a result of running a large amount of unremediated code? Will there be consequences to your customers? Of what magnitude? (Orders arriving late versus never.) How will earnings be affected? (Okay, I know that you are not the CFO. However, is the business now being run less efficiently so that costs have increased by 10% or more?)

I'd appreciate whatever information you can provide. And both of us can mention the word "electricity" so that Rick keeps the post up.

-- Anonymous, January 19, 2000

Gordon, An OT question - are you the Gordon (pilot) that "debunked" the rumors implying that y2k might have been the cause the two 737's(?) forced to land landing problems on Roleigh's listserve? If so, youdaman, good work! (Actually, I am quite confident it was you, but not quite as confident as I was in that Y2K wouldn't be a big impact at the rollever). Please confirm ;)

Regards,

-- Anonymous, January 19, 2000

Jay, I work for an semi-commercial organization that spends more money than it makes. But on the other hand, it's other peoples money that we spend. Regardless of that, our code base is very similar to that of any truly commercial business, and the consequences of its failure would have measurable consequences for both our customers and the public they serve.

The most crucial of the day-to-day business operations software was remediated by mid-1999, but we still have two or three failures a week in that area, all of which so far are being fixed successfully as they happen. Things slow down or stop for an hour or two while the problem is chased down and a patch applied. The app (or apps) are started up again, and away we go to the next round.

I believe the fact that our code base is largely centralized is an important advantage in dealing with these Y2K problems. When we change it in one place, we change it for all users at one time.

As for our larger base of "non-essential" code, the owners of this code are getting by with work-arounds, and are giving themselves extra slack in getting things done over what was their norm before the rollover.

In any event, nothing has happened so far that has come anywhere close to paralyzing our operations. Maybe we have been lucky so far, but I now believe that our Y2K guru was right in having us concentrate our heavy-duty remediation efforts on a relatively few absolutely have-to-have applications, perhaps 25 out of 200. This has given us breathing room to deal with problems in the next lower tier of systems, as they crop up.

All that being said, we are one organization out of hundreds of thousands on earth that depend on computers, and I myself am not prepared just yet to write off Y2K as a bump-in-the-road event. By March or April, the long-term trend should be clear.

-- Anonymous, January 20, 2000

FactFinder,

Yes, I am the Gordon that posted that commentary on the 737s to Roleigh's web list. It wasn't so much a debunk as my opinion that it looked like just a common microswitch failure. As I noted, there are 100s of microswitches in large commercial aircraft and the landing gear system is monitored by anywhere from 1-2 dozen, depending on the size of the plane. The 747 for instance has a lot more monitor switches because it has a more complex landing gear. We used to joke that we drove 18 wheelers, just like the truckers do, because the 747 has that many tires. The fact that it hit two 737s in a close time frame seemed just coincidence to me, nothing more. And as far as I know there is no computer interface with the landing gear, since it is just a relatively simple hydraulic/mechanical system. So, nothing more than the type of problem I have seen numerous times, and not serious, although of course the pilots would land at the nearest suitable maintenance base to have it fixed.

-- Anonymous, January 21, 2000