September 21, 1989

Chuck Daniels was now the CIO.   He looked out the window at the view of the city but he did not see the view.  His mind was back in 1969 in the conference room with Randy, Rob and Greg.   He could hear the conversation.

“Someone will laugh about this, but while you are at it, put in the hundreds and thousands too.”

“Why?”

“Because year 2000 is coming.  And when it does, any system with a two position year is in trouble.”

“None of these systems will be running then.  These will have a seven year life at best, then IBM will come out with new hardware and we rewrite the programs.”

“Not this time, some of the COBOL will be running in 2000, this language is not like the Autocoder and SPS on the older machines, it isn’t tied to the computer, it can be recompiled.  If I had my choice I’d put in 4 positions and pack it so it doesn’t take so much space.”

He shook himself back to the present and turned to his Applications Manager, “How many of our systems would you guess will be replaced before 1/1/2000?”
Rob nodded, “Twenty percent, maybe.”

How many of the remaining 80% will not run properly after that time?”

“Over 80%.”

“So you’re telling me that we have ten years to fix nearly 65% of our programs?”

“Yes, and a lot of them are going to be trouble, we had a lot of people who wrote shit code.”

Chuck’s face reddened, “Where did you get that phrase, “Shit Code”?

“From some guy named Randy back where you came from.  Just talked to him about this today.  Did you know him?”

“Yea, he said I wrote shit code.”

“Well I have good news and bad news for you, you weren’t the only one, there were others, that’s the good news.  And the bad news is there were a lot of others, and they wrote a lot of really bad code.  Your code wasn’t even in line for being called the worst.  When we were trying to hire people who would fit in, you know, ones that were nice to be with, we hired a lot of guys that couldn’t program.  They fit in but they wrote a lot of shit code.  And that code has to change before 1/1/1999.”

“What do you mean, before 1/1/1999, don’t we have till 1/1/2000?  What happened to the other year?”

“Well, I talked to Randy about this yesterday, we were discussing how to approach the problem.  He says we have till November 1998 at best.  The good news is we aren’t the Government, they have till October 1998.  There are problems other than the year 2000, we used 99 as an end of table or deleted item code.  These will cause problems in early 1999.”

“Then we had better get cracking.”

“You think he’s right?”

“I’d bet on it.  You know he predicted this mess in 1969.”

“Should we get him out here?”

“Better had, ask to have him for a week or two, maybe they’ll cut him loose.  I would ask for more but I doubt if I can stand him any longer than that.  He will tell everyone I wrote a lot of shit code.  Worse he will tell them the good thing was I was slow.”

The following week Randy was in the corporate IS with others planning the fixes.  The cost was high the project would have to go to the board of directors.   The company was in a tight situation.  Spending was set for the next three years at twenty percent of what they requested.  They would have little more than money to continue the planning and identification. 

My site Ralph Brandt

First, Previous and Next chapters Of Y2K

Y2k Chapter One Introduction

Y2k Chapter Seven The Company Retires a Resource

Y2k Chapter Nine Moving on