[deadrock]

It was not a scam from the programming side. Legacy programs on IBM mainframes had to be reprogrammed and recompiled to expand the "year" field from 2 to 4 bytes.

If it was not done, there was the potential for a customer to be charged on their utility bill for over 100 years of utility usage.

As they stood, programs could not tell the difference between 1900 and 2000.

[be-baw]

I understand. What ticked me off at the time was how much we were charged for the fixes. I worked in a power plant at the time and the supplier for our digital control system (DCS) got a cool million for the fix. The system was sole-sourced so we were boxed in for what probably cost them no more than $10K to fix.