The Columbus Ohio Police and Fire radio system was upgraded about 2 months ago. They had the Y2K upgrade on the local nightly news and showed the police and fore using the old system of cards and phone contact. They assured everybody that Y2K would not be a problem and the upgrade went smoothly...even though the outage was 6 hourds longer than expected. That was the last you heard about the upgrade until last night when the same local news reported that a computer glitch shut the system down unexpectedly. Naturally nobody mentioned the earlier upgrade as being the problem but did say the system has been very stable without any problems until today (after the upgrade) Maybe I am just paranoid but it makes your mind wonder about the sucessful upgrade. Ohio has started to understand they are in deep dodo. Read my post from last night about the state auditor Petro's summary of our problem,

Bill

-- Bill, (Y2K@hotmail.com), February 26, 1999

Answers

Hi Bill, the Durham 911 system was upgraded to the reportedly Y2K-compliant Motorola 800 system about three years ago. One or more of their consoles goes down about once a month, sometimes for a couple of hours, and they have to rely partly on hand-helds. It's nothing to do with Y2K, just par for the course. The National Crime Information Computer and state info computers go down more often, usually not for long, but can be down several hours. They're overloaded as it is and on a Saturday night the wait for drivers license or license plate information can be a lengthy one. I wouldn't worry too much yet--it's probably just the normal bugs in the system. Of course, if power goes down and their generators run out of fuel, THEN they'll be in big trouble. As usual, though, trust but verify!

-- Old Git (anon@spamproblems.com), February 26, 1999.