Global IT Outage

jim8flog

Journeyman Pro
Joined
May 20, 2017
Messages
15,490
Location
Yeovil
Visit site
Where did you get that information from?
something on the box some years ago. It was also said that a few government systems still run older versions of Windows for stability reasons.

Back in my working days the company run one of their main systems on a mainframe that used Cobol . It did what was required an no need to spend the money on a new system.
When the year was going to change to 2000 a lot of old cCobol and Fortran engineers/programmers earnt loads of money updating the software to cope.
 

3 jabber

Member
Joined
Jul 12, 2024
Messages
66
Visit site
something on the box some years ago. It was also said that a few government systems still run older versions of Windows for stability reasons.

Back in my working days the company run one of their main systems on a mainframe that used Cobol . It did what was required an no need to spend the money on a new system.
When the year was going to change to 2000 a lot of old cCobol and Fortran engineers/programmers earnt loads of money updating the software to cope.
I used to fix the DEC systems that were used on RN submarines.
 

rulefan

Tour Winner
Joined
Feb 21, 2013
Messages
14,992
Visit site
something on the box some years ago. It was also said that a few government systems still run older versions of Windows for stability reasons.

Back in my working days the company run one of their main systems on a mainframe that used Cobol . It did what was required an no need to spend the money on a new system.
When the year was going to change to 2000 a lot of old cCobol and Fortran engineers/programmers earnt loads of money updating the software to cope.
Which in fact they didn't need to to. Most of my systems used IBM Autocode, PL1 or Cobol and didn't need any modification. We didn't use fortran.
 

jim8flog

Journeyman Pro
Joined
May 20, 2017
Messages
15,490
Location
Yeovil
Visit site
Which in fact they didn't need to to. Most of my systems used IBM Autocode, PL1 or Cobol and didn't need any modification. We didn't use fortran.
I think the primary problem was that companies used a 2 digit year so had to change to a 4 digit year.
 

rulefan

Tour Winner
Joined
Feb 21, 2013
Messages
14,992
Visit site
I think the primary problem was that companies used a 2 digit year so had to change to a 4 digit year.
I think many didn't realise that dates were in fact converted behind the scenes to a number expressed as the number of days since the first day of AD. So many companies wasted money on working out how to tackle a problem that didn't in fact exist or at least was not as difficult as thought. Many consultants made good money out of it.
 
Top