On Sun, 03 Oct 2010 12:03:38 -0400, Edward Reid
wrote:

On Fri, 1 Oct 2010 09:26:25 -0400, "Stormin Mormon"
wrote:
Were there other things that were going to fail?

As others have said, as of 1990 nearly everything would have failed in
2000. The percentage of programs which do not use dates in any way is
small. In 1970, Y2K was not even on the perceptual horizon for most
programmers, including me. (I wrote my first program in 1966, full
time starting in 1971.) A few businesses which project decades into
the future (such as life insurance) were mostly OK because they were
dealing with 21st century dates even in 1960.

The real problem was that much software had been in use *way* beyond when the
programmers assumed it would be. Other issues included the programmer's
stupidity (programming an exception to an exception, but not its exception .
In a lot of cases what was really scary part was that there was no source code
or tools to recreate the programs companies relied on for their business. Y2K
solved a lot of that as an aside.

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