This has to do with the debate among intelligent people, excluding the nuts on either side.

1. I think that the Y2K challenge varied enormously among organizations. For some organizations, it may be enough to call it just maintenance, computers go down all the time, etc etc. For others (think banks) that does not begin to address the severity of the problem of a very large number of things going wrong in production programs.

2. There was a lot that was happening that there was no way of knowing about. As I pointed out, in one of my very infrequent posts on old TB2000, Ed Yourdon has never wriiten for Reuters. News from abroad that we got was that not much was being done. It turned out that they were doing the necessary, thank the Lord, but how were we to know.

-- Peter Errington (petere@ricochet.net), September 27, 2000

Answers

Define nut....

-- Doc Paulie (fannybubbles@usa.net), September 27, 2000.

"Define nut...."

Anyone who ever woried about the y2k bug or mentioned it in public, or ever posted on Y2K forums for whatever reason, and STILL DO.

That includes everyone you know on this forum. Me especially.

-- (smarty@wannabe.one), September 27, 2000.

To Doc Paulie:

You ask "define nut." OK on your side, people who don't accept what I have written as honest in any way, but just yell doomer doomer meme meme til the cows come home.

-- Peter Errington (petere@ricochet.net), September 27, 2000.

doc paul.. pull your slag fucking head in bitch

-- dribble dick (yo@way.cum), September 27, 2000.

Peter, there are 2 very separate issues as I see it:

1. How much Y2k work was there to do? / How much got done? How much didn't get done?.... We can approximate the answers in general, but specific cases are obviously all over the map and we don't really know those answers (you are correct in this)

2. Is "cascading cross faults" a valid model for the effects of computer problems? The answer appears to be NO. And the fact that there were ZERO *visible* glitches at rollover (way less than even expected by optimists) nails this one shut IMO.

I think you have to consider these questions separately. Because news media carry only big stories, of course we didn't hear about all the work being done. Of course we didn't hear about problems that doubtless DID occur. That is because the answer to #2 is NO.

Y2k fear grabbed ahold of the public imagination not because of #1 but because of #2. If only #1 were ever thought an issue, we would not be here discussing it as if it were something important. Only #2 makes it anything more than a big YAWNER. (except for the question "Why did we ever get so excited about this?"... now that is worth pondering IMO.

-- Debbie (dbspence@usa.net), September 27, 2000.

Peter,

FWIW, you've always seemed like a decent guy to me. I don't think being wrong about Y2K automatically makes you into some sort of raving lunatic...although being right about Y2K apparently doesn't exempt one from this classification either.

Some people never seemed to consider economic self-interest as a driver for Y2K. All companies want to survive and make money. To the extent that the Y2K problem threatened either of these two goals, companies were willing to spend money and time to fix them. However, they weren't going to spend more money than needed as shown by the results in Europe and elsewhere.

I think that Ed Yourdon and the other pessimists simply assumed that 1) All businesses are run by morons and 2) economic self-interest just wasn't a strong enough motivator to fix EVERYTHING that might fail due to Y2K, therefore, things were going to be bad. He was partially right about number 2. What he never seemed to take into account was that businesses would do enough so that survival and profits weren't threatened and that would be enough not to have society collapse around our ears. That's pretty much how business responds to all threats Y2K was just a more public threat than those faced by businesses every day. As Flint has written so frequently, less than 100% does not equal 0% - that's, I think, an important lesson to remember about how our world really operates.

There was a good reason why Yourdon never wrote for Reuters. Most people outside the relatively small number actively involved in the whole Y2K process perceived that the government and businesses were handling things well enough that this wasn't going to be a big problem. I know that that's hard to believe for some folks but it's true. Most news agencies simply believed that Y2K wasn't going to be a big enough story to sell more ad space so they went after other things. As it turned out, Reuters was more correct than Yourdon.

-- Jim Cooke (JJCooke@yahoo.com), September 27, 2000.

Jim, you've brought up several good points. On one, economic self- interest, I believe it wasn't taken more seriously by pessimists because market forces (obviously) are not as strong in local and national government agencies as they are in the private sector. And many foreign countries still aren't nearly as market driven as the U.S.

I think that Ed Yourdon and the other pessimists simply assumed that 1) All businesses are run by morons and 2) economic self- interest just wasn't a strong enough motivator to fix EVERYTHING that might fail due to Y2K, therefore, things were going to be bad.

Another reason why pessimists probably didn't take the economic self- interest angle more seriously is because if an organization needed two or three years to remediate their Y2K problems, the desire to be ready by Jan. 2000 wouldn't mean much if that organization had waited until mid-1998 to begin remediation. I also think there was concern because even if say 85% of all mission-critical systems in the U.S. were ready in time, the effect of 15% not being in time could have been rather disruptive.

2. What he never seemed to take into account was that businesses would do enough so that survival and profits weren't threatened and that would be enough not to have society collapse around our ears.

I don't think he ever predicted society would collapse. That was Gary North's claim.

There was a good reason why Yourdon never wrote for Reuters. Most people outside the relatively small number actively involved in the whole Y2K process perceived that the government and businesses were handling things well enough that this wasn't going to be a big problem. I know that that's hard to believe for some folks but it's true. Most news agencies simply believed that Y2K wasn't going to be a big enough story to sell more ad space so they went after other things.

In my opinion, U.S. news agencies didn't take Y2K more seriously because what concerned people in the U.S. the most was the banking and power industries, and those industries--at least in the U.S.-- were obviously working very hard on the problem and making progress.

Also, the media never gave much thought to what might have happened in the U.S. if countries like Venezuela, for example, would have had significant problems getting items to us that we import from them, or if countries the U.S. exports to had not been able to afford our goods and services because of economic problems Y2K might have caused in those countries.

As it turned out, Reuters was more correct than Yourdon.

I think what Peter Errington was referring to when he mentioned Reuters was a lack of specific information about what kind of progress was being made by foreign countries--many of which did not begin working on Y2K until 1999.

The most disturbing aspect of Y2K was that it wasn't enough for an organization to be Y2K ready. The vendors an organization depended on for parts or raw materials needed to be ready as well. So did ports, ships, and whatever else might have been involved getting items from point A to point B that organizations needed.

-- Lurker (here@since.March), September 28, 2000.

I. EUROPE has a far different attitude to building software and computer systems than the US. People familiar with SAP know what that is all about. In addition, the level of computerization may or may not have been as "deep" as the "Charlotte's Web" MYTH of the FUD makers. FACTS: NOTHING MUCH HAPPENED. YOU COULD SEE THAT ON TV AS ABC and PBS ROLLED ACROSS THE WORLD.

HOWEVER.........it was the "HYPING" of the ORIGINAL PROBLEM (supplemented by the "extrapolations" of the Doomzies) that BLEW UP THE Y2k FUD BALLOON to the point where the US of A WASTED $50 Million Dollars on a "Crisis control center" for a NON-CRISIS.

IT WAS THE.............TRADES THAT BLEW THIS UP INTO THE HOT AIR BALLOON AND THAT CONTINUED TO THE CDC OF 1/1/2000: CW, CIO, INFORMATION WEEK. Even Ratcliffe's Y2k ZDNET.com was adding "possibility stories" to the end. Even while Mitch was Blasting the Doomzies into Orbit.

There was a good reason why Yourdon never wrote for Reuters. Most people outside the relatively small number actively involved in the whole Y2K process perceived that the government and businesses were handling things well enough that this wasn't going to be a big problem. I know that that's hard to believe for some folks but it's true. Most news agencies simply believed that Y2K wasn't going to be a big enough story to sell more ad space so they went after other things.

BULL........MOST OF THE FUD STORIES HAD THEIR **ORIGINS** in THE PR FLACK PRINTED IN ***TRADE MAGS*** Re-written by staff writers. To the END........CW was printing MALARKY from the vendors. IT was even "TIME LINED". From the "not enough time/programmers/money" of 1996 we evolved to "embedded" and FINALLY to FULL PAGE ADS FOR "CONTINGENCY PLANS" and "IV&V OR ELSE".

The Latter was a "biggie" that fell on its face. All the TRADES spewed editorials about the need to "TEST, TEST and TEST". Meanwhile, the issues would have the full page ads and the "stories" about ALL THOSE PROBLEMS THE "EXTERNAL TESTERS" FOUND.

IT WAS BS THEN and the De-bunkers published the great Texas story: one "entity" had TWO IV&Vs run tests against the same bunch of programs. The "entity" had found its own problems which include those the testers found. BUT......IT GETS BETTER. Tester I found problems Tester II didn't and VICE VERSA. The "entity" got rid of both and proceeded on the assumption that 'if this is the best that is out their we will roll our own". They DID. .........result? Few problems that couldn't be fixed at once on failure and non "mission critical". (DON"T EVEN BOTHER ASKING FOR THE NAME OF THE "ENTITY". GO AND FIND THE POSTS ON DE-BUNKER. I HAVE THE SOURCE DOCS.).

-- cpr (buytexas@swbell.net), September 28, 2000.

Lurker:

I think you are missing Jim's point a bit when you write:

[I also think there was concern because even if say 85% of all mission-critical systems in the U.S. were ready in time, the effect of 15% not being in time could have been rather disruptive.

The most disturbing aspect of Y2K was that it wasn't enough for an organization to be Y2K ready. The vendors an organization depended on for parts or raw materials needed to be ready as well.]

These comments, superficially reasonable, imply a subtle misinterpretation. You have categorized systems as being either "ready" (no problems), or "not ready" (unacceptably nonfunctional for some unacceptable period of time). But what Jim is driving at is the question of whether any given system is ready *enough*. Now just how ready is "enough" in real world practice?

Neither I nor anyone else ever had a definitive answer to this -- we all needed to estimate where this point might be. In practice, this depended on a very long list of variables. Briefly, it depended on how many date bugs were in a given system, how many of *those* would result in intolerable effects (crashes or garbage out), how difficult and time consuming these serious bugs would be to find and fix before they bit and after they bit, whether post-remediation test coverage was sufficient, whether the failing system was important, etc.

I believe optimists and pessimists were in widest disagreement with respect to where the "enough" point might be. At the pessimistic extreme, the assumption was that anything short of perfection wasn't enough. Since perfection wasn't feasible, we were in deep shit. At the optimistic extreme, the assumption was that a global fix-on- failure strategy (no remediation by anyone) would have been enough for nearly all organizations to muddle through with only brief problems not particularly threatening to the health of the organization -- and that the few disastrous exceptions to this principle would simply have lost business to the competition.

You write:

[because if an organization needed two or three years to remediate their Y2K problems, the desire to be ready by Jan. 2000 wouldn't mean much if that organization had waited until mid-1998 to begin remediation.]

Now, in hindsight this is clearly false, because it implies a "finish line" and if you're an inch short you die, while if you're an inch past it you are perfect. You say that starting too late to complete the entire task means that what they CAN complete "doesn't mean much". WRONG! It means a WHOLE LOT. Only a few of their many systems are indispensible to the operation of any organization -- the rest they can get along without for a while. And real-life experience has shown us that even *these* systems need not work particularly well, they just need to work at all. The effort necessary to get these systems to the "working at all" state is all that's really required, and this is a TINY percentage of total remediation. In hindsight, we can see that in all but a few cases, we were *already* close enough to this point for fix-on-failure to be the most cost-effective strategy.

So in other words, in practice the "good enough" point is WAY short of perfect, and quite easy to reach quickly. When you say it "wouldn't mean much", you have again fallen into the erroneous mindset that "close enough" and "bug-free" are damn near the same thing.

As I see it, the whole debate hinged on what "ready" really meant. If "ready" is interpreted to mean "important problems can be kept inside the glass rooms" then most organizations were "ready" before they even started remediation. And for all of us outside those rooms, that's what counts.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), September 28, 2000.

Redux redux

Qouth Peter:

"1. I think that the Y2K challenge varied enormously among organizations. For some organizations, it may be enough to call it just maintenance, computers go down all the time, etc etc. For others (think banks) that does not begin to address the severity of the problem of a very large number of things going wrong in production programs.

2. There was a lot that was happening that there was no way of knowing about"

For ALL organizations Y2K was "just maintenance". The importance of getting sufficient maintenance done might vary from system to system, but it was all maintenance. And as such, there was never a chance that all organizations were going to open up their maintenance books for public scrutiny. There are legal AND competitive issues involved in such things, you know. It always amused me that anyone expected privately owned businesses to tell them how their internal system maintenance was going. And public concerns, pressured to make some kind of statement, were only going to say what their legal departments allowed.

Try calling your local power company and asking them to GUARANTEE that the power will be on tomorrow morning

Debbie posited:

"2. Is "cascading cross faults" a valid model for the effects of computer problems? The answer appears to be NO. And the fact that there were ZERO *visible* glitches at rollover (way less than even expected by optimists) nails this one shut IMO."

THIS is why polly folks were constantly bringing up the fact that "computers go down all the time, etc etc". If cascading faults were EVER a valid model, computer systems would barely function at the best of times.

Every USABLE computer system has some degree of fault tolerance designed into it. Y2K could be seen as a test of that tolerance. Obviously, as a whole, we never came close to the limits.

-- RC (randyxpher@aol.com), September 28, 2000.

One of the problems that obfuscated Y2K was confusing remedial work on systems (i.e. software) that used dates with the idea that similar work had to be done on (all) systems with embedded chips.

News reports about the work done in power companies (as an example) usually had to do with their billing systems. Somehow people felt that if work had to be done there it also had to be done everywhere there was a chip. Couple that with all of the misunderstanding of embedded systems promulgated by Bruce Beach, Shakey, etc. despite Cherris best efforts to explain reality to them. Then Paula got into the act.

They seemed to believe that chips had hidden clocks, secondary clocks and used dates. I think this confusion (perhaps self induced) in thinking that since systems that used dates such as financial systems had to be remediated all systems had to be contributed to a lot of the Y2K hysteria.

-- The Engineer (spcengineer@yahoo.com), September 28, 2000.

I apologize for coming into this discussion rather late. I was excoriated last year for suggesting market forces would resolve the vast majority of Y2K problems.

Link

This same essay (essentially) was originally posted on TB 2000 in the early spring of 1999 under the title "Y2K and Risk." Errington makes two common points from last year. First, doomsayers thought most computers ran well rather than "well enough." IT systems are fairly tolerant... mostly because there are large numbers of people working around the clock to manage the endless problems. Second, there were many clues to the actual progress. To dredge up one favorite example, there was no surge of insider selling during 1999. Say what you will about human greed, it is as reliable as the sunrise. Had insiders sensed a major problem, they would have moved assets in a large way. This never happened. Oh, there were a horde of other clues, but, in the words of the X Files, the truth was out there.

-- Ken Decker (kcdecker@att.net), September 28, 2000.

Of course, if you were one of the many thousands
of people that suffered finacial ruin because
you were dependent on an organization that upgraded
their software late in 1999 to become Y2K compliant,
then you might feel that Y2K was a significant
crossing.

PeopleSoft shares closed at $18.38 on
Friday, a drop of more than 30 percent
since January.

. . .

Berquist said the industry peaked in 1997
with about $35 billion in revenue. Since
then, the industry has languished at between
$25 and $30 billion in revenue, and he and
other analysts say that one main reason
for the drop-off was the Y2K glitch.

The theory goes that many companies last year
simply stopped buying enterprise software --
which can cost hundreds of thousands to
hundreds of millions of dollars -- when
they realized they could not have it in
place and tested in time for any possible
millennium trouble.

-- spider (spider0@usa.net), September 28, 2000.

There is a lot in these answers so far that is worth responding to, and I just have time right now to respond to some of the points raised. I'll try to do more later. Debbie's post, for example, was one that I thought was quite good, but I'm not going to cover it now.

1. Ken Decker's point about "the truth being out there" is very well taken wrt a part of the problem, namely large American businesses, or at least large enough to be publically traded. And there was other information which came out in 1999 which was reassuring, such as the fact that Y2K remediation firms were running out of work. I ceased worrying about such businesses long before rollover.

OTOH, here is an example where the truth was not out there. There was a Reuters article around mid 99 which said that businesses in Indonesia (as I recall, the article stressed banks) had spent so much time and energy digging out from the rubble of the 97-98 horror show that they hadn't really done much to prepare for Y2K.

A more saavy article would I am sure have uncovered reasons why there was a lot less to worry about than we thought at the time (e.g. prevalence of packaged software). However, the truth was not out there for such as we to find.

2. Quick point: RC is absolutely right that all Y2K was maintenance. I blame my unclear writing for the confusion. I meant "just maintenance" in the sense of "just maintenance ho hum."

3. I agree with Jim Cooke about the importance of Flint's point, that less than 100% does not equate to horribly dangerous failure. In fact, I regard this as a cornerstone for rational discussion of the Y2K problem

Having said that, I am in profound and total disagreement with some of what Flint has written in his answer. (And absolute, too.)

Flint writes: "Only a few of their many systems are indispensible to the operation of any organization - the rest they can get along without for a while. And real-life experience has shown us that even these systems need not work particularly well, they just need to work at all. The effort necessary to get these systems to the "working at all" state is all that's really required.....In hindsight, we can see that in all but a few cases we were already close enough to this point for fix-on-failure to be the most cost-effective strategy".

My reaction to reading this was flat-out disbelief. You do NOT take that kind of cavalier sloppy attitude if you are dealing with a system where people's money is involved. (And 95% of all the systems I have dealt with in my career have involved people's money.) I can see such a system not being perfect at rollover, with a few oddball cases missed that could be corrected later. But this system had better do the vast bulk of its transactions perfectly, down to the penny.

-- Peter Errington (petere@ricochet.net), September 28, 2000.

Peter: Well, maybe Flint is over-generalizing to make a point (a valid point IMO) about the redundancy of computer systems. And how to infer that ? In 1999 what I saw is this process of making observations, and working BACKWARD from the fact that we saw VERY FEW few computer failures in 1999 vs. what had been expected.....to arrive at certain nearly unavoidable conclusions about computer systems IN GENERAL (my point #2, no cascading cross faults). It worked for me, and squared with what I was seeing..... Now, as you point out there are SOME computer systems which CANNOT fail or there would be hell to pay. Yet these WERE remediated (AT&T as just an example), and these we did hear about in the news. In some cases it was surely a big, important job but do-able well within time frame (unlike what Yourdon was bleating out "100% of 'software projects' [not *maintenance* which it really was] come in late'). And relative to total expenditures for a company, the amount was small. The situation in 1999 WAS indicative (if not conclusive). If I may, Flint, resurrect something earlier you wrote on this:

...We were aware of the Gartner Group/Capers Jones studies showing that anywhere from 25% to 40% of date bugs would strike before rollover *if left unremediated*. We were aware that a fortune was being spent on remediation. We were aware of spike dates passing uneventfully (despite serious concerns from Yourdon and others who WROTE those spikes). We were aware that remediation was stirring a long-stable code base and introducing new errors that would crop up immediately, and seeing none. We were aware that switching to whole new systems (like SAP and PeopleSoft) *always* caused big headaches, and an estimated 25% of businesses were doing exactly that, and ALL of them were (of course) doing this *before* rollover. We were aware that embedded systems that had knowledge of the date were undergoing clock-ahead tests everywhere, and we weren't finding functional problems. We knew the worry level was WAY low among nearly everyone except those selling remediation services, survival supplies, or books.

And despite all this, we just kept saying "It's not 2000 yet!" .... From my perspective, we had a veritable cornucopia of "y2k weather radar" showing blank screens. Ignoring all of this wasn't just cynical, it was *required* to keep the Doomer Faith.

Now, I could understand the reasoning use by those who (before rollover) said they wouldn't sound their own all-clear for some months. At least I *thought* I understood it. Had there been a great many visible date bug problems, and had it therefore taken some period of time to get around to them all, it was always within the realm of possibility that known (but postponed) problems could propagate, causing "downstream" headaches for those who didn't "own" these bugs themselves. But what's crucial is that these problems would be self-evident and obvious, and we (and the media) could track them.....

But in practice, date bugs never got anywhere near *close* to unmanageable. NO "disruption trend" was set in motion. And you *still* have a hard core of Doomers who refuse to recognize this, and are still waiting. So what I'm pointing out is that refusal to look at (and consider the implications of) these blank screens was a matter of FAITH. .../... -- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), March 01, 2000 http://hv.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=002erv

-- Debbie (dbspence@usa.net), September 28, 2000.

Peter:

I suppose there must be some aphorism to the effect that it's impossible to say anything so clearly someone somewhere won't misinterpret it.

You are entirely correct. Programs that deal with money must be precise well beyond the penny level. There is no tolerance for errors which screw up numerical amounts. But as a class, y2k bugs (date mishandling) weren't in a position to do this, except in a certain few instances where the results were not subtle, they were system crashes or really obvious gross blunders (like the error that put $19 million into *everyone's* account, and was corrected within minutes).

How can I adequately communicate that even these financial programs are sloppy in ways having nothing to do with the actual financial calculations? By and large, we weren't dealing with the hassles of wringing out problems new software is prey to. The calculations and code logic could be left intact, only the date handling routines needed to be changed.

But I readily admit that banking and other financial systems were more at risk than anything else. And you will notice that it was *these* systems that sucked up the big remediation bucks. One of the implications of Ken's precious free market is that organizations understood their exposure and allocated remediation resources appropriately. Financial systems are in the minority of systems for which fix-on-failure would not have worked.

I also admit to some amusement that you take my statements intended to apply across the board, averaging out all kinds of organizations, extract the worst possible case, and treat it as *typical*. Yet another symptom of how you got it wrong, and a very common one. Most doomers treated the worst imaginable case as the NORMAL case, and generalized from there.

Look, literally millions of organizations of all sizes rely to some degree on computers. According to Capers Jones, even small development projects have a measurable failure rate -- it's not zero. Yet to my knowledge, NO organizations died due to y2k bugs. And most small businesses did NO remediation. Our utility people tell us NO plants would have tripped if NO remediation had been done. Do you suppose y2k inspired our programmers to bursts of unheard of brilliance? Everywhere in the world?

I think we need to admit the problem was way overblown to begin with. We need to concede that with a few exceptions, either dates don't play a critical functional role, or where they do they are easy to diagnose and fix when they're wrong.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), September 28, 2000.

This same essay (essentially) was originally posted on TB 2000 in the early spring of 1999 under the title "Y2K and Risk."

Those interested in the original post can find it here. Some interesting debate along with some typical name-calling by Russ BigDog and a humorous reposting of the "About this forum..." by Old Git.

-- (hmm@hmm.hmm), September 28, 2000.

Flint, I've just read your latest, which contains the sentence "Financial systems are in the minority for which fix-on-failure would not have worked."

When I read this sentence, I decided to play a thought experiment on myself. "Totally off the top of your head, what would you guess, of all the mainframe application systems in the world, the percentage of the total is for financial systems?"

My answer was 60%. This may be ridiculously high. I've never thought this thought before. And of course my answer could be exceedingly biased by the fact that such systems occupied most of my mainframe career.

-- Peter Errington (petere@ricochet.net), September 28, 2000.

Debbie:

Do you still want to stand by this statement:

Consider that a year after Y2k, whatever happens, there will still be disagreements.... then it will be about why what happened happened, just like there is about the rest of the events of history.

-- Debbie (dbspence@usa.net), March 26, 1999.

A big :^)

Prophet?

Best wishes,,,,

Z

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), September 28, 2000.

Peter:

Good question, likely requiring some careful definition of a "financial system". For example, I work with a kitchen-sink system that handles parts. This includes an ordering system, a billing system, an inventory system, a tracking system, and a whole bunch of other things involving everything from prices to lead times to sizes, colors, approval levels and you-name-it.

Is this a financial system? Well, partially. So you may be right about mainframe application systems. My area is embedded systems, so I wouldn't know. I tend to visualize a pre-remediation spectrum something like this (assuming pure fix-on failure here):

fatal y2k exposure ----- Major y2k problems for months, big business hit ----- Major y2k problems for weeks, moderate business hit ----- minor lingering y2k problems, long hours for geeks ----- big y2k problems for days, panic patching ----- y2k problems above the noise level, geeks stay busy for weeks ----- y2k problems lost in the noise, business as usual.

Now, I wonder where along this line most organizations fell. I suspect NONE fell at the fatal far end, because if some had, at least one of them would have mismanaged things hopelessly. I think most financial organizations were at the "major for weeks" level before starting, and the average organization would have been somewhere in the next two up. Non-mainframe organizations probably started in the last two categories.

AFTER remediation, I believe mainframers were in the second-last category. From a global outside perspective, seeing that y2k-induced business failure wasn't even one in a million and an attentive media couldn't find any serious problems anywhere, I must conclude that the overall remediation effort, while focused, was fairly routine.

I should also address your original second point. You are right, there was a lot happening that we could not know about. There is always one hell of a lot happening we don't know about, and we don't worry about it. You ask, "how were we to know"? Well, we were in the position of not being able to know, and being desperate to fill in the blanks with *something*, even if was uninformed assumption.

If you think back, you will see a systematic pattern on the forum of (1) Assuming the worst unless assured otherwise; and (2) Rejecting assurances otherwise as being self-serving or clueless. I've been calling this second item faith-based Doomism for several years now. But the first item is more interesting. There are those who assume things will be fine unless reality proves otherwise, and there are those who assume things will be awful until they aren't. This has nothing to do with evidence, and everything to do with character.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), September 28, 2000.

Errington,

I never really cared about people's personal financial decisions. The issue was the militant insistence that the "pollies" were either idiots or gov't shills. Faith in a Y2K apocalypse took a great deal of effort and the willingness to ignore or dismiss out of hand any counter-arguments.

Flint,

When you add "precious" to capitalism, you make me sound like a proud father. Capitalism is the great white shark of economic systems... merciless, efficient, near perfect in purpose. Of course, if you are a smaller fish, your impression might vary.

-- Ken Decker (kcdecker@att.net), September 28, 2000.

Well, This is certainly one of the better threads we've had lately - and it even has something to do with Y2K :>)

I just have to wonder if many of the people who were the most pessimistic about Y2K really understood just how many porblems crop up everyday with computer systems, including mainframes and embedded systems. For example, one of the systems I worked on was a SCADA system that monitors dams and powerhouses. It includes input from a large number of embedded systems. It generates alarms every time it detects a fault, and the fault types run into the hundreds. Everyday I'd go in and see a huge pile of printout paper that contained the overnight alarms. I assumed that something must really be wrong to have that many alarms but the operators assured me it was perfectly normal. Some of the alarms occured because the input system was broken. Some occured because of software problems. A very small number occured because of a real fault. The operators had become very skilled at recognizing the "phantom" alarms and ignoring them while still responding to the real alarms. This has been going on for years and is still going on.

The point of this story is that the public never knew just how badly this system operated on daily basis. Yet, humans were able to adapt to the faults and still extract valid information from the mass of data. This is how many software systems operate. Y2K was another challenge but not any bigger than ones being faced - and fixed - daily. I suspect that even financial systems, of which I know practically nothing, have similar problems that require human intervention to fix but companies certainly don't make things like this bullet points in their annual reports.

Flint and Debbie both make excellent points about how the whole Y2K debate centered on many issues that didn't really have anything to do with a date problem. If you believed that the government was always evil, that business was always incompetent and dishonest, and that we were living in a society with technolgy spinning out of control, how much information would have been enough to convince you that Y2K wasn't really going to be a big problem?

-- Jim Cooke (JJCooke@yahoo.com), September 28, 2000.

"I just have to wonder if many of the people who were the most pessimistic about Y2K really understood just how many porblems crop up everyday with computer systems, including mainframes and embedded systems." -- Jim Cooke

No, Jim, I'm sure most of us did not and will not. What we did see was one group of experts, including Ed Yourdon and Bruce Webster, suggest that the horrendous increase and simultaneous effect of Y2K related problems could be catastrophic. As opposed to others such as yourself, who simply saw Y2K problems as business-as-usual. Erring on the side of caution -- the pessimistic rather than optimistic approach -- was what most of us doomers saw as the prudent choice.

-- King of Spain (madrid@aol.cum), September 29, 2000.

Quoting Debbie:

"Now, as you [Peter] point out there are SOME computer systems which CANNOT fail or there would be hell to pay."

I'm not so sure I can buy into this idea (which probably explains why I was such a polly).

Since we seem to be referring to financial systems here, I'd like to make the distinction between actual BANKING software (a very small percentage of what's out there), which does merit a somewhat higher standard of concern, and business financial software, which, in my experience, tends to be just about as bug-prone as any other code. Yes, even though it deals with "people's money".

So when Peter said...

"I can see such a system not being perfect at rollover, with a few oddball cases missed that could be corrected later. But this system had better do the vast bulk of its transactions perfectly, down to the penny."

... I have to insist that even the most critical banking systems were not "perfect" BEFORE rollover. Once you reach a certain level of complexity, there's no such thing as a "perfect system". And once you pass information from one system to another, transmission glitches can mangle good data in strange and wonderful ways.

Even absent Y2K, the BEST you can ever hope for is that the "vast bulk" of your transactions process correctly. So you have error handling and manual contingency plans in place to handle the stuff that falls outside the bulk. It's all business as usual. That's why I've always maintained that Y2K was nothing more than a stress test of the system's fault tolerance (and a large but ho hum maintenance project).

So I guess what I'm trying to say is: If your business is so frail that your survival depends on the "perfection" of your computer systems (even the finacial stuff), you're doomed anyway.

-- RC (randyxpher@aol.com), September 29, 2000.

KOS:

Your recent mad scramble to reposition yourself is most unseemly. Think back. Better yet, go back and *read*. Neither Ken nor I ever had any problems with preparation to whatever level gave you peace of mind. Indeed, I often mentioned and sometimes detailed my own extensive preparations. If the debate had been about the prudence of preparation, it would have been mild to nonexistent.

Yet look how Ken and I were treated. Clearly, the whole acrimonious screaming match had nothing to do with preparation. What Ken and I did, repeatedly and in detail, was to point out that the hysteria required to join the gang wasn't reasonable. In fact, it was consistently self serving, dishonest, self-contradictory, and illogical. It consisted of forcing carefully selected information (from any source) to fit foregone conclusions while rejecting everything else, and of vilifying anyone who pointed this out.

You didn't get y2k totally wrong because you could not know better, but because you *would* not know better. Far from defending "prudence", you were among the many on the forum who would have burned Ken and me at the stake to preserve and defend the faith, if only you could have. And you'd have done this NOT because we argued against "preparation", but because we demanded that you defend your position with some semblance of integrity, and you could not do so.

We can now clearly see *why* you couldn't do so -- experience has demonstrated that you had no valid position to defend. The danger existed only in your imagination, which you maintained by distorting or rejecting reality and attacking anyone who disagreed. And now here we have you and Peter saying "How could we know?" Well, opening your eyes would have helped.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), September 29, 2000.

OK, Flint, then maybe you and Ken and even Andy Ray should form some kind of support group, meet weekly, and have good crying sessions about how terribly mistreated you were at ye olde TB2000. Gawd.

And I am sorry that you were banned, too. It was after I left the forum, for what it is worth, I sure had nothing to do with it. But all the whining will not change what happened, and many (like me) have apologized for a lot of the ill manners. But it is getting somewhat tiring, and pointless.

-- King of Spain (madrid@aol.cum), September 29, 2000.

KOS:

You stated that one group of experts thought things would be bad. No doubt, they did think this. However, other experts thought things wouldn't be bad. The vast majority of people worldwide, as evidenced by their behavior, agreed with the latter group. I think that Flint's point is that those who thought things would be bad were not open to any persuasion that things wouldn't be bad - the doomer view became a fixed position. So, the question is really why that happened and how will that happen again. It seems likely that some new crisis in the future will start this all over again. I come here, in part, to understand why this fixed position evolved and what can be done to prevent it in the future.

-- Jim Cooke (JJCooke@yahoo.com), September 29, 2000.

Flint, you refer to my asking "how were we to know" and suggest that opening my eyes might have helped.

With respect to the example I gave, the inadequate Reuters article on Indonesia, how would opening my eyes have helped?

I specifically agreed with Ken Decker that a lot of optimistic information on the United States was "out there." I was aware of this information and happy about it.

-- Peter Errington (petere@ricochet.net), September 29, 2000.

I cant recall ever getting per se brutal w/anyone. If I did before the rollover, I do apologize. I've seen some brutal posts (yeah, um thanks, I think to the creep;-) from back then.

I guess I was more interested in simply prepping to pay attention, see I was AFRAID. Like it or not, I was. I am ashamed now, but I cant really even say I learned anything. I'd (heres the shocker) probably done the same all over. I did NOT investigate, like Lars, I came in a lil on the late side.

When I'd see brutal posts, I'd skip over them. I spent alot of time prepping more so then posting. I felt like a jerk when all over the place all was well. To this day, nobody tells me how foolish I was, thank God.

I dont resent the repeated threads even, just the jabs, but I am not even taking those to heart, see I FINALLY understand why alot of folks are still angry, personally, I really dont blame them. They took alot of crap. I dont think anyone will ever figure all of it out though.

Would be interesting to know the TRUE stats on how many prepped and what level of intelligence they have., um, moi included.

-- consumer (shh@aol.com), September 29, 2000.

Jim, when you call the doomer view a fixed position, you're right in the sense that preparation of one kind or another was recommended to the end. You're wrong though about doomers still expecting a collapse of society in December 1999. TEOTWAWKI was never the majority view on TB2000, and after the August 1999 NERC report on power, I knew most of the U.S. was going to have electricity in January 2000.

Doomers operated under the assumption that serious disruptions could occur in industries and countries if they did not seriously address Y2K. Responsible Y2K speakers like Peter de Jager and Senator Bennett made that point in 1998. While both did moderate their views on Y2K as progress was made in 1999, they never did retract the point of view that Y2K was something that had to be fixed. Fix on failure was seen as a very risky policy.

Doomers were looking for specific information on progress being made in not just the power industry, but in others as well. Foreign countries, too. As I'm sure you know, Jim, lawyers in many cases made sure information was not specific. After the most important areas like banking and electricity had been remediated in the U.S., 'doomers' turned their attention to other potential risks such as whether foreign countries would be able to get enough oil to this country to avoid an economic impact.

The fact that TB2000 existed until and then past the rollover doesn't mean there was a fixed opinion on Y2K's outcome. The recommendation to prepare in some fashion never changed, true, but what was being looked at as potential problems *did* change. The fact that 'doomers' never joined the campaign to calm others about Y2K was not a sign of stubbornness; they were considering the potential impact of problems in areas besides banking and electricity where there wasn't as much hard information about progress available.

-- I (modified@my.views), September 29, 2000.

Spain,

You miss the point. The personal attacks were just a smokescreen. You were a member of a cult defending your faith against heretics like Flint and me. The vicious attacks only proved that the true believers could not defend their faith on its own merits. This was pretty obvious to people outside the cult. Here's a lesson. When you're in a debate and the other guy starts calling you a dirty dog... you're probably winning.

-- Ken Decker (kcdecker@att.net), September 29, 2000.

I:

I haven't done this so I'm just speculating. I wonder if we tabulated ALL the posts in December 1999 from those on the pessimistic side of the issue, how many would say that things weren't going to be as bad as they first thought. My admittedly imperfect memory is that an awful lot of posters were still talking about bugout bags, buying more ammo, and the like. I think it's easy, in the light of what's happened the last nine months, to say that the average position had, in fact, moderated during 1999 but I'm not so sure that's true.

-- Jim Cooke (JJCooke@yahoo.com), September 29, 2000.

To RC:

Interesting point of view. I think we're in disagreement, but I'm not absolutely certain of that, so let's discuss it.

First, let's eliminate, if it exists, a possible source of confusion. There is the distinction which must be made between people who handle transactions kicked out by the edit routines of a computer program, and the maintenance programmers who hunt down bugs in production programs,

An example from my own experience: At one government agency where I worked, I was the project leader for a new version of the payroll system. Once we delivered it, I was still project leader for payroll for quite a while.

In the Controller's shop, my client, there was a team of, as I recall, five people who used my system and among other functions, handled the erroneous transactions which had been kicked out. On my side of the house, the IT shop, in the maintenance division, I had one programmer working full time on my system. All or at least most of what she did was making minor modifications to the system dictated by changing requirements - changes in the regulations, that sort of thing. I say "at least most" because I can't remember if she found any bugs in what we delivered. I don't recall any, but maybe I'm blocking.

We possibly tested our system more extensively than most before it went into production. Payroll is right up there with a banking system, insofar as it had better be in good shape. The wise project leader does not want to come to the immediate unfavorable attention of TPTB because the payroll is screwed up.

Does what I have described tie in with what you have described?

-- Peter Errington (petere@ricochet.net), September 29, 2000.

Peter,

Just getting ready to go home for the weekend, so I don't have much time to discuss until Monday (my home PC is in several pieces at the moment - just moved to a new house).

The short version is: Payroll is internal to the company, and unless the system crashes to the point where people are quitting because they're not getting paid, it's not visible to customers/suppliers/etc. I've been effected by two payroll glitches in the 7+ years I've been at my present company.

Heads may or may not have rolled, I don't know... but I don't see payroll functions as having anywhere near the level of criticality as banking apps.

I would also say that, it seems to me, payroll programs would tend to be pretty static and fairly low on the complexity scale - but admittedly I've never worked in payroll, so you might educate me differently - and that being internal sytems, they aren't doing much interfacing with the outside world.

The more complexity you add to a system, and the more communication you do over dirty phone lines with other systems, the further you get from the ideal of the "perfect" system... that's what I'm getting at, I think. And that the firing of a project leader is only TEOTWAWKI for him or her...

Hope this made some sense - I'm not so sure it did. I'll pick this up on Monday (if anyone's still interested).

-- RC (randyxpher@aol.com), September 29, 2000.

I see it more of an existence versus essence conflict. Western society has moved towards demanding proof and discussion of existence before consideration of essence. It is not an accident that many of the pessimists were fundamentalist Christians [see many of the remnants on Ezboard]. It is not a millennial thing with them. The basis of their world-view is that one accepts the existence of God, Jesus and the fact that the Bible is the literal word of God on faith. You then spend your time discussing essence [look at some of the massive threads on Ezboard discussing the meaning of one Bible verse]. Discussion of existence is not permitted. Even recognizing the right to discuss existence would destroy their world-view. I am not simply choosing fundamentalists. The philosophical approach to the world is the same for survivalists, militia members, tax protesters, etc. Y2k was the same for them. Accept the existence of the problem on faith, not permit discussion of this matter and get on with discussing the essence. Not an existentialist among them.

Best wishes,,,,,

Z

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), September 29, 2000.

By-the-by, I also know some environmentalists wedded this paradigm.

Best wishes,,,,

Z

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), September 29, 2000.

I haven't done this so I'm just speculating. I wonder if we tabulated ALL the posts in December 1999 from those on the pessimistic side of the issue, how many would say that things weren't going to be as bad as they first thought. My admittedly imperfect memory is that an awful lot of posters were still talking about bugout bags, buying more ammo, and the like. I think it's easy, in the light of what's happened the last nine months, to say that the average position had, in fact, moderated during 1999 but I'm not so sure that's true.

Jim, since I know you didn't really join the discussion on Y2K until after the rollover, I know you weren't aware of the gradual moderation of opinion on Y2K last year. Let me quote for you what a couple of optimists said last fall about the views of pessimists on TB I.

http://hv.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001ZBW

The Changing Y2K Argument

In my opinion, the prevailing pessimist argument has evolved since mid-1998 (when I began reading Y2K speculation on the Internet.) In the early days, it was the "iron triangle" argument with a panic- induced collapse in 1999. This argument was de rigueur until Y2K awareness skyrocketed and we began blowing by "critical" dates with no significant problems.

As 1999 progressed, the hot new argument became international trade. We may be OK, but our trading partners will drop like flies. Of course, it's harder to forecast the end of civilization based on higher prices for VCRs. A nuanced version of this argument involved natural resource shortages. Fortunately, some readers actually lived through the recession and oil shortages in '72-73. While there were short tempers (and a sour economy), somehow the Republic survived.

While this argument is still in use, the new "angle" is "chronic versus acute." This thesis suggests rollover will have some problems, but Y2K will really be death by a thousand small cuts.

http://hv.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001lMe

New to the forum? Worried about Y2K? Ever hear of the JoAnne Effect?

There is a surprising consensus occuring as the date draws nearer. It is exhibited in several ways. For instance, last year you could separate the Doomers from the Pollys by asking whether or not they believed their power utility would fail where they live. Now, a significant portion of Doomers acknowledge that power will either remain on, or fluctuate in a manageable fashion - as opposed to failing and remaining off for a period measured in days. (See Your prediction please: Do you believe your local electric utility will deliver uninterrupted power through the 991231 - 000101 roll- over?)

-- I (modified@my.views), September 30, 2000.

Uh-oh! The dredging up of the past... Thank you for the compliment, Z. It's nice to be pointed to one of the saner things I said last year. ;-) Good to see you,

-- Debbie (dbspence@usa.net), September 30, 2000.

RC:

After reading your latest, I am more convinced than I was that you are confusing the bad data problem (which always will be with us and must be routinely handled by staff) with the program bug problem.

Your emphasis on telecommunication convinces me of that. (There are methods for determining bad transmission which can be utilized. I dimly remember, I think, learning about things like hash totals and odd-even parity. I may well be getting these terms wrong, because I never was a telecommunications expert in any way, shape or form. Someone like Maria I'm sure has forgotten more than I ever learned about telecommunication.)

Anyway, a well-designed computer system will have a great deal of fault tolerance with respect to handling bad data. To put it another way, it will be excellent at identifying bad transactions and kicking them out.

To cover some of your other points:

You say that you suspect that "payroll programs...tend to be pretty static and fairly low on the complexity scale." This is absolutely not true in the U.S Government.

You are correct about the impact of payroll failures being confined to the particular organization. My point was that the quite bug-free nature of what we delivered was tied in with extremely strong personal incentives for perfectionism which may have been absent (probably were) in other development efforts.

-- Peter Errington (petere@ricochet.net), September 30, 2000.

I:

No, I wasn't here pre-rollover....I was working on Y2K problems rather than engaging in the idle and uninformed speculation that I've seen on the old TB2K. I've read most of the messages going back to June.

Your link to the "Will We Have Power" thread has lead me to do a little calculation. There were 55 messages, disregarding a few from Porky and the like. Of this total, 32 believed that we wouldn't have power, 16 believed we would have power, and 7 were undecided. With one exception, every one of the posters that believed we would have power were people who were identified as "pollies". They included people like Malcolm Taylor and Dan the Power Man who actually knew what they were talking about. Without exception, those that believed we wouldn't have power were the usual "doomers" like A, Dennis Olson, and Gold Real. The majority of these posters believed that power would be out for many days to months. As far as I can tell, not one of these posters has any actual power industry experience and, as we now know, they were all spectacularly wrong.

If this is your idea of views moderating then I guess you and and I are using definitions from a different dictionary.

-- Jim Cooke (JJCooke@yahoo.com), September 30, 2000.

I just looked at that thread Jim Cooke mentioned. I see various shades of opinion on it, even among pessimists. And no mention of buying more ammo.

One of the gloomier things on that thread was a quote from the California NG.

Spokesmen say the Guard would be ready for just about anything the New Year might bring -- including massive power outages."

"For the Y2K phenomena, we're ready with fuel. For example, generator crews, we have 50 of them, we have trucks, C130s, Blackhawks and Chinooks (helicopters) and people and shelters and armories and so on," said California National Guard Col. Terry Knight."

"Crews at California's Office of Emergency Services will also be on duty round the clock through New Year's weekend."

"We are connected with all the counties by satellite with generators so even if there was a problem we would be able to communicate with one another to help protect public safety," said the agency's Tom Mullins."

The California Guard of course was NOT predicting the end of the world as we know it by saying that, and I don't think the other pessimists on that thread were either. There is a difference between being ready for the unknown vs. predicting doomsday.

-- (shades@of.opinion), September 30, 2000.

Shades:

First, I never said anything about buying more ammo in relation to this link. Second, the issue I was addressing had nothing to do with anything the National Guard was doing. The issue is that doomers had somehow moderated their position by late 1999 and were no longer expecting to lose power. The link proves that this is simply not true. The shades of opinion on the doomer side ranged from losing power for periods ranging from days to months. A rather strange type of moderation.

-- Jim Cooke (JJCooke@yahoo.com), September 30, 2000.

OTOH, here is an example where the truth was not out there. There was a Reuters article around mid 99 which said that businesses in Indonesia (as I recall, the article stressed banks) had spent so much time and energy digging out from the rubble of the 97-98 horror show that they hadn't really done much to prepare for Y2K.

A more saavy article would I am sure have uncovered reasons why there was a lot less to worry about than we thought at the time (e.g. prevalence of packaged software). However, the truth was not out there for such as we to find.

The article on Indonesia you referred to, Peter, ("Indonesian banks eye survival, not bug") can be found at:

http://hv.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=000sdK

-- (May@26.1999), September 30, 2000.

I may be wrong here, but it seems to me that you are discussing the details that Ed, Gary, Paul, Ken, etc were wrong about. Not what made it possible for them to draw in so many followers. Seems to me that is the important point.

Yes :^), I must be wrong.

Best wishes,,,,

Z

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), September 30, 2000.

I am indebted to Ed Yourdon and Gary North and Don McAlvaney for alerting us to how fragile and vulnerable we are in our modern world. It was a wake-up call to an apathetic populace. Everyone seems to be gifted with 20/20 hindsight, but not too much foresight back then. We are still here and have another chance to be a bit more self-reliant. Let's be grateful for the "watchmen" and their warnings. We have all gained something.

-- Eleanore Mameli (eleanore@mail.island.net), October 01, 2000.

Eleanore,

Yourdon, North, et al, did not show us how "vulnerable and fragile" we are. If that was really true then we'd now be sitting in the dark trying to figure out how to survive. They THOUGHT that our system was vulnerable and fragile and they were wrong. The system was designed to withstand all types of breakdowns and assualts and it performed as advertised. You'd be a lot better off thanking all those faceless people who fixed problems that could have caused trouble rather than thanking people who turned out to be utterly wrong in almost every prediction they made.

-- Jim Cooke (JJCooke@yahoo.com), October 01, 2000.

It seems to me that many here want to demonize the true heores of this debate while not allowing the third parties their day in their sun.

-- Bimi Thanton (Bimit@littlerock.con), October 01, 2000.

Amazing that Eleanore's point has been mentioned so many times. The pessimists consistently described our systems as being tissue paper about to be hit with a wrecking ball. So we all watch this ball hit and bounce off without causing so much as a scratch, and some people STILL thank the pessimist spokesmen for "alerting" us to the fragility of our systems.

This is kind of like thanking the guy who told you to bet on the Cubs. After all, without his advice, you'd never have realized how powerful those Cubs really were! I keep wondering if these thanks for nothing aren't some type of extra-dry humor.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), October 01, 2000.

Here's an article that's a good example of what was and wasn't known about Y2k as of November of last year. Note the continuing concern about infrastructure in certain foreign countries.

"U.S. Y2K adviser terms glitch chronic"

http://www.businesstoday.com/techpages/y2kchronic11051999.htm

-- What did we know and when did (we@know.it), October 02, 2000.

Excerpt from the article...

U.S. Y2K adviser terms glitch chronic

Reuters

Friday, November 5, 1999

President Clinton's chief adviser on the Year 2000 technology glitch warned the nation Thursday that Jan. 1 would not mark the end of Y2K- related concerns.

At the same time, a working group led by the Treasury Department voiced concerns about the Y2K readiness of key public and private institutions and the infrastructure of many countries including China, India, Russia.

The President's Working Group on Financial Markets cited concerns about small- to medium-sized enterprises worldwide, including in the United States, and about ``the financial sector in several small European markets'' that it did not name.

``One risk is the potential for a 'domino' systemic effect brought about by significant disruptions to these groups because of the Y2K rollover,'' said the working group, which consists of the Treasury, Federal Reserve Board of Governors, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Many of the countries that are least prepared for the Year 2000 are important energy exporters, said the report, prepared at the request of Rep. John Dingell of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the House Commerce Committee.

ENERGY EXPORTERS THREATENED

``Any significant disruptions from the century date changeover that impact (the energy) industry locally could have a negative impact on the U.S. and global economies,'' the report said.

It cited Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Nigeria, Algeria, Indonesia, Turkmenistan, Malaysia, Uzbekistan, Nigeria, Angola, and Colombia as among energy exporters that ``may experience disruptions tied to Year 2000.''

-- What we we know and when did (we@know.it), October 02, 2000.