Remember the predicted Y2K disaster ?
heck, I remember the New Ice Age of the 1970s, Nuclear Winter in the 1980s, and the Ozone Holes of the 1990s.
Yes, I still have my cases of bottled water and dried beans...........
I was in a group of about 70 people who worked on Y2K program remediation. Our group looked at tens of thousands of programs and made an average of about 4 in each one. That was one little group. Worldwide millions of programs were reviewed and fixed. If, after all that effort, we still had massive problems, that would have been cause for lament. All we proved was if you mobilize the entire I/I community for several years they can eradicate a rather simple but pervasive problem.
When people tell me we spent too much money on fixing computer programs I ask: What level of failure did you want? Did you want loan accounts to suddenly be 99 years behind schedule? We have a manager whose husband received a notice that his next loan payment was 36,160 days overdue. Did you want insurance policies to expire because the billing notices weren't sent out? After all, they wouldn't be due for 99 years. Did you want inventories of chemicals to all get thrown out prematurely or, worse, remain on shelves 99 years past their due date?
The important thing about Y2K was that the lawyers were banking on years of lawsuits based on Y2K claims. They came up empty. So we techies screwed the lawyers. It's a good thing.
Hey! Don’t be dissin’ the Y2K. We made a lot of money off of that scare.
Two different things. Y2K was man-made. There were shortcuts in computer programs taken that would have caused serious problems if they were not corrected.
The problems were caused by “laws of man”; rules that are made up by man with the best of intentions. On the other hand, man’s arrogance is shown by the people that believe they can disrupt the “laws of God” which rule our natural existence.
BTW I help fix some of the Y2K problems. One of my customers used the Y2K effort to revamp there entire systems and became more productive.