From: Spike Jones (spike66@ibm.net)
Date: Mon Oct 26 1998 - 20:23:24 MST
mark@unicorn.com wrote:
> William John [anthropy@inwave.com] wrote:
> >*** WHY *** would any outages occur? How can a simple date cause such
> >problems?
>
> Here's a simple example: a few months ago Swedish engineers tested their
> nuclear reactors for potential date problems. They discovered that any
> date in the year 1999 caused a shutdown, because the programmers had used
> a '99' date as some kind of end-of-data marker; this kind of thing is common
> practice....
mark, i am reminded of a programming class i took in high school where
we used a microprocessor as a data collection device. if one were to
input 9999, it told the processor you were finished, commanded it to end
data collection mode and go do the data analysis. if you happened to
have an *actual* reading of 9999, well, too bad. {8^D spike
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