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Vintage years.
- Thread starter KC9UDX
- Start date
Chuck(G)
25k Member
I think you mean "1991" or "1985" or "1974". If your checks are older than 1974, your bank has probably changed hands several times.
blackepyon
Veteran Member
Considering how much of a scare Y2K caused before it turned out to be a soft fizzle (surprise! the world didn't end), I'm surprised they didn't send you free replacement cheque books.
mnbvcxz
Experienced Member
Perhaps Y2K would have been much worse had they not spent years correcting the software, I remember early 2000 there was a shutdown at the factory I was working in and my first thought was that it was due to Y2K.
Chuck(G)
25k Member
Yes, it was a great time for contract COBOL programmers. 
I wonder if any 32-bit machines will still be operating under Linux when 2038 rolls around.
I wonder if any 32-bit machines will still be operating under Linux when 2038 rolls around.
daver2
10k Member
I sat on our company's Y2k committee and the numbers of equipment that failed the tests that we required for operation of our plant was quite large. Even equipment that had a 'clean bill of health' by their respective OEMs even failed our testing sometime! We only spent money on correcting a problem if one existed.
Funnily enough, I am working on a 2027 issue at the moment (7 bits from a base date of 1900). We found out where any other discontinuities were likely to be during the projected life of the plant at the same time as doing the Y2K testing.
Dave
Funnily enough, I am working on a 2027 issue at the moment (7 bits from a base date of 1900). We found out where any other discontinuities were likely to be during the projected life of the plant at the same time as doing the Y2K testing.
Dave
RobS
Experienced Member
I also worked on Y2K at my company and I think I was the only person to discover a Y2K problem in a software package supplied by an outside company that claimed that it was compliant. I was actually explaining to the end user how to devise his own Y2K test plan, so as an example I said, "For example check what happens when you type in something like this." Unbelievably the application immediately went wrong. Purely by chance I had triggered the only fault in that application, which must prove how adept I was at devising tests. Also it was apparently the only fault that we found in packages from external suppliers.
Our company used "golden handcuffs" for Y2K, which were bonuses to be paid out after millennium day if we didn't leave to go to another employer before then as there was so much head hunting of extra IT staff by other companies. Consequently in 2000 I was able to take early retirement with a very generous bonus, but then I had found the one genuine Y2K fault in a whole mass of third party software and it only took me a few seconds!
Our company used "golden handcuffs" for Y2K, which were bonuses to be paid out after millennium day if we didn't leave to go to another employer before then as there was so much head hunting of extra IT staff by other companies. Consequently in 2000 I was able to take early retirement with a very generous bonus, but then I had found the one genuine Y2K fault in a whole mass of third party software and it only took me a few seconds!
RobS
Experienced Member
It's funny that you should mention that. One of my responsibilities during Y2K was to work with a member of the company's accounts department on replacing our cheque processing facility. As we still received a substantial number of cheques from clients every day we had a small machine for preprocessing them similar to those used at bank branches, which saved us the bank charges for their doing it. We acquired it many years earlier when the volume of cheques received was higher, but with payments by direct debit and standing orders increasing over the years the numbers had decreased.
The equipment was supplied by an external specialist company but the existing software wasn't Y2K compliant and their latest compliant software didn't work with our very old machine, so we would also have to buy a new machine. The question was whether it was still financially worthwhile for us to have one or whether it was cheaper to pay the bank to preprocess the cheques. We decided that it was worthwhile and got management approval to buy and install a new machine with the new software, so that was a fresh experience for me as I was a software specialist and didn't normally get involved in equipment purchases and installation at all.
As it happened our management decided to sell the entire company to a group around then and the formal takeover actually took effect at the end of the millennium, so there's no saying whether the new owners would have endorsed our decision to buy the machine had it not already been acquired and installed some time earlier. As it was the accounts department did get their nice new cheque processing machine though.