I would be interested to know from y2k fixers only, what they think would have happened to their organisation had it not corrected y2k. This is directed obviously at companies etc who are fairly advanced in or who have completed y2k rectification work.

-- Richard Dale (rdale@figroup.co.uk), July 02, 1998

Answers

This is very simple. Our operations would have ground to a halt. People think that they have until 01/01/2000, but if you schedule any events in the future you must subtract that from the deadline. We schedule 6 months in advance, so we must be completed by 06/01/1999. Our system will simply not function with dates above 12/31/99, no if's and'ss or but's.

I have been working for 1 year on our y2k project, we have about 1 year to go. I work in a small shop with only 200,000 lines of code. We are very, very lucky. If we had just 10 times the code we would not finish, and 2 million lines of code in a business is nothing.

have fun

j

-- jh (yada@yada.com), July 02, 1998.

In answer to my own question: If a large UK Insurance company had not fixed y2k, certainly the General Business operation would have ceased. Causing policyholders to be (temporarily) without cover, several thousand jobs lost, consequent loss to shareholders, other knock-on effects resulting from the loss of a large financial business. The Life Business (50% of the operation) may have survived. Any large financial institution relying on old 1970s core systems will suffer the same fate if they don't fix y2k. PS I know nothing about the effects of y2k on the non-financial operations of utilities or embedded chips, therefore I would not comment on them. I think that each correspondent should separate knowledge from conjecture. Regards Richard

-- Richard Dale (rdale@figroup.co.uk), July 10, 1998.