re: #112 Vicious Babushka

I was a contractor for almost my entire career, and I developed a habit of voluminous documenting of all the code I created. Especially during the late 1980’s when Y2K was just around the corner, and I was compelled to write code to “convert” 2-digit year fields by bit-flipping. Good times.

Company I worked for did a Y2K conversion where they built a subroutine program that did a calendar offset to went to a year where the days of the week fell on the same calendar day, etc. as 1999, 2000, and so forth. The conversion project was then working out everywhere a few major applications used dates and then inserting a call to the subroutine to do a conversion, allow the date manipulation or display in the program to its thing and then convert back.

Half the applications I worked with had been developed in 1992-94 and I’d won an argument during the design phase to have full date fields and that the application was going to last more than six years. Contrary to the media doom-saying in the late 1990s many IT departments were thinking about the Y2K issue a decade before it became a reality.