Remember last week when we were talking about who knew what when with regards to the government? Same goes for the corporate world too. When did the oil big wigs know about embeddeds. The following is a quote from CIO magazine in an old article...but it is relevant to the issue of who knew when...

"Most organizations were late to recognize the threat posed by embedded processors. At Amoco, for example, the effort to fix mainframe-based computing systems began in early 1996; the search for embedded processor problems started more than a year later, in mid-1997. That leaves little time to complete a search-and-destroy mission."

See the link: http://www.cio.com/archive/090198_y2k_content.html

-- R.C. (racambab@mailcity.com), December 27, 1999

Answers

mid 1997... before they began to talk about it as a problem. It was mid 1998 before they really got their people out on the riggings in refineries looking for these problems. Even mid 97 was at least 2 years too late to start talking about it. They needed to start at least in 1994 or earlier.

-- R.C. (racambab@mailcity.com), December 27, 1999.

At the multi-billion dollar oil company where I work, we got serious about Y2K in late 1997. We didn't finish the project. I'm supposed to call a toll-free number on January 4 to find out if I should report to work.

-- Dog Gone (layinglow@rollover.now), December 27, 1999.

Dog Gone,

Have you got an Irridium Satellite phone... [as supplied to all the Senators so that they can provide "heroic efforts" to solve the code problems in the blink of an eye]...

good luck :o)

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), December 27, 1999.

Dog Gone,

Do you work at a refinery that utilizes embeddeds at all? If so when did they begin to actually work on embeddeds there (If there were any)

Also, are your refineries going to stay on-line for rollover or will they shut down or just slide over to idle? Say, how did you get to stay off during rollover? Maybe you're a desk jockey? :-)

-- R.C. (racambab@mailcity.com), December 27, 1999.

An equally interesting question is: when did they decide that fix on failure was the remediation of choice for expensive and/or hard-to-reach systems?

-- cgbg jr (cgbgjr@webtv.net), December 27, 1999.

cgbg jr,

You said:

An equally interesting question is: when did they decide that fix on failure was the remediation of choice for expensive and/or hard-to- reach systems?

-- cgbg jr (cgbgjr@webtv.net), December 27, 1999.

An excellent point, excellent question. Now for a not so excellent answer... I dunno. I think most of these fellows gave up on it within 6 months of starting. Most started physical involvment in early 1998. By mid to late 1998, they'd given up, if my sources are correct. I began to hear privately from my sources that the white flag seemed to go up mid summer of 98. I can't point you to a text or article or a quote to confirm that though.

-- R.C. (racambab@mailcity.com), December 27, 1999.

R.C.--I noticed that after about July of 99 the incidence of refinery explosions suddenly dropped off. I assumed that these explosions were consequences of attempted embedded testing. But if so, they didn't "give up" until summer of this year.

-- StanTheMan (heidrich@presys.com), December 27, 1999.

Dog is gone!?

-- d----- (dciinc@aol.com), December 27, 1999.