[Info-vax] Clustering on VMS 4.7

[P. Sture]

In article <Gqednfc7-dK21XTUnZ2dnUVZ_hGdnZ2d at giganews.com>,
 "Richard B. Gilbert" <rgilbert88 at comcast.net> wrote:

> The Y2K problem, AIRC, was that software that originated in the years 
> 1955-1999 frequently wrote dates such as 4/17/09 and, with the 
> millinium, this became ambiguous!  Did it mean 4/17/1909 or 4/17/2009? 
> As early as 1975, people realized that this would become a problem.  Of 
> course nobody did anything about it until late 1999 when everyone panicked!

The other aspects were screen and printout real estate, not to mention 
disk space. In the 1970s / early 1980s we never thought that those 
applications would still be running twenty years later (and many 
weren't); lack of portability meant that a new platform meant a rewrite 
anyway.

> VMS, itself, did not use two digit years until some 
> genius added that feature sometime in 1999-2000!

I recall being somewhat upset about that :-(

> The entire IT group was on hand at midnight 12/31/99 just in case.  The 
> year rolled over, everything still worked, and we all went home.

Fortunately here, both the first and second of January are public 
holidays, and our team was responsible for development and test systems, 
so the boss was the only one on call that night. Having started on Y2K 
stuff at the end of 1997, with dedicated test systems we could change 
dates on, we were confident we had caught everything.

-- 
Paul Sture