Virus check or threat?

robinson46176 · Post by **robinson46176** » Fri Jul 06, 2012 11:38 pm

Back in my wood burning computer days (last half of the 1960's) one of our specialties was payrolls. We were running about 50 payrolls from a few dozen employees to some with 500+ employees. It was quite a feather in our cap when we got the payroll for for an internationally known magazine. We did the early part of the run and then sat up to print checks... Whoa!!! the amounts wouldn't fit in the little printed box on the check. They seemed to us to be like those PowerPro parts prices guys were fainting over earlier. We thought that we had a serious bug in the system someplace. Really serious... (Y2K type serious)

Some quick checking calmed us down. The executives checks were printing first and DANG!!! they were just getting paid that much.

The regular employees were paid much less but still kind of high compared to what we were making. I really did consider going to them and applying for a job.

We had to learn a lot of stuff fast. Back then almost everything we were doing was breaking new ground. It was a good but short run, about 6 years. Then all of the rules changed. Even though it was frequently not practical a lot of larger companies wanted the prestige of having their own in-house system especially bank clients. We bought out and absorbed several other companies like ours but that only delayed what was coming and unstoppable.

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swampgator · Post by **swampgator** » Sat Jul 07, 2012 11:33 am

Wow, Fred! You got paid in two months that which I earned in a whole year. LOL And, I was a GS11 for the feds. I did take one table of data from a Cobol program and migrated it into Microsoft Access. Why they ever did it in Cobol was overkill. Not sure I could do it again as it has been 10 years and the languages have changed so much since then.

Hence, the satisfaction on the Shopsmiths.

dusty · Post by **dusty** » Sat Jul 07, 2012 11:37 am

swampgator wrote:Wow, Fred! You got paid in two months that which I earned in a whole year. LOL And, I was a GS11 for the feds. I did take one table of data from a Cobol program and migrated it into Microsoft Access. Why they ever did it in Cobol was overkill. Not sure I could do it again as it has been 10 years and the languages have changed so much since then. Hence, the satisfaction on the Shopsmiths.

Then there are those of us who knew Cobol that were already on a corporate contract. We worked the same long hours and didn't make that much in three months.

paulmcohen · Post by **paulmcohen** » Sat Jul 07, 2012 1:54 pm

swampgator wrote:Tried it and you get either a green background or a red background. It was only a second.

About the Y2K, I spent many hours along with many other government workers correcting databases, rewriting them in another language, installing new computers with the compliant chips, testing to ensure that they would calculate the year 2000. In 1998 and 1999, many hours overtime for which I did not get paid since I was salaried, but we made sure that all our servers and desktops were compliant. I had about 26 databases to change. However Social Security, traffic lights and utilities moved the scale to do some calculations good for 10 years. Traffic controller systems are still out of date and sometimes, the stuff you hear in the news is directly related to the Y2K non-compliant systems. It was not a hoax. And, it was not limited to Microsoft software. Ashton Tate dBase II, III, III+, IV, Foxpro, Foxrun running on either Zenith DOS, Peachtree, IBM Dos or any of those programs had buried in the software memory fields with either a 9 or 99 causing them to fail on 1/1/2000. By 2000, we had eliminated all old DOS programs and had moved to Windows or SQL server programs. But, utility providers and Social Security and air traffic controllers need to get up to speed instead of the fudged stuff they did 12 years ago. So, if you find out from Social Security one day that you are dead and can still read the communique, just know it's still a glitch from Y2K not corrected. Thank God, we got most of it done. Then contractors came in with no bid contracts and who knows what they have done. They use no programmers as far as I know. The contractors use OTS software that is well programmed. I don't know what the rest of the military uses, but Navy/Marine Corp use all Microsoft.

I also spent 1998 and 1999 getting rid of Y2K issues and we had a large team going all of the country reviewing code and looking for old chips that only had a 2 digit year (Original IBM PC, almost ever ATM is the world, virtually every commercial nuclear power plant in the US). Without all this work by untold numbers of people we would have had way worse issues than plans falling out of the sky. I still spent New Years Eve 1999/2000 in Hawaii figuring if we missed something that was the safest place to be. It is unfortunate that most people did not understand the billions spent to make sure nothing happened.

swampgator · Post by **swampgator** » Sat Jul 07, 2012 2:35 pm

Dusty, not sure we clearly understand each other. As a GS-11 at the time, my annual income was about what Fred made in 2 months. I might start my time about 7 am and end about 9 pm. No overtime, as it is often less pay on overtime. So, I just took comp time and when a fellow employee needed leave to cover his illness (cancer treatments, heart attacks, etc.), I gave that time as I did not have the time to take off. So, they were able to benefit. I could only keep 240 hours of leave on the book and I can't remember the limit of comp time I could keep, so it was nice to help others who needed the help.

Ed in Tampa · Post by **Ed in Tampa** » Sat Jul 07, 2012 2:55 pm

To me Y2K was a joke, a boogey man story to frighten people that got frightened easily.

However it did bring in a lot of money for those that offered peace of mind of Y2K problems.

I know many data centers added another virtual machine under VM just to test date problems in programs. I'm told most of these were booked constantly from 1998-1999 Dec 31.

Never heard of one disasterous crash with lost of data caused by Y2K

dusty · Post by **dusty** » Sat Jul 07, 2012 3:06 pm

swampgator wrote:Dusty, not sure we clearly understand each other. As a GS-11 at the time, my annual income was about what Fred made in 2 months. I might start my time about 7 am and end about 9 pm. No overtime, as it is often less pay on overtime. So, I just took comp time and when a fellow employee needed leave to cover his illness (cancer treatments, heart attacks, etc.), I gave that time as I did not have the time to take off. So, they were able to benefit. I could only keep 240 hours of leave on the book and I can't remember the limit of comp time I could keep, so it was nice to help others who needed the help.

When I was at that point in my career, I made the decision to work for a defense contractor. I was salaried so there was no overtime and sick time was limited to 5 days/year. Officially, there was no such thing as comp time. Fortunately, I worked for an experienced supervisor who understood how to get maximum support from his crew. We worked for him, he took care of us.

We, however, were not the best paid crews given our technical and professional backgrounds but I don't believe we want to go there. We all make choices, some good and some not so good.

paulmcohen · Post by **paulmcohen** » Sun Jul 08, 2012 2:48 am

Ed in Tampa wrote:To me Y2K was a joke, a boogey man story to frighten people that got frightened easily.

However it did bring in a lot of money for those that offered peace of mind of Y2K problems.

I know many data centers added another virtual machine under VM just to test date problems in programs. I'm told most of these were booked constantly from 1998-1999 Dec 31.

Never heard of one disasterous crash with lost of data caused by Y2K

Ed you are so wrong, I was not being paid to make anyone feel good. Without millions of man hours and hardware upgrades (at a cost of $300 Bilion dollars) disasters would have happened, I simulated many of them. The best result happened and there were no disasters . I was only focused on PC and microprocessors based applications.

Some views can be found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem

JPG · Post by **JPG** » Sun Jul 08, 2012 1:57 pm

paulmcohen wrote:Ed you are so wrong, I was not being paid to make anyone feel good. Without millions of man hours and hardware upgrades (at a cost of $300 Bilion dollars) disasters would have happened, I simulated many of them. The best result happened and there were no disasters . I was only focused on PC and microprocessors based applications.

Some views can be found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem

I think Ed was viewing it from a computer center viewpoint.

From an infrastructure controller viewpoint that could have been disastrous as you mentioned.

Now about that sneaky cia thingey!!!!!!!

charlese · Post by **charlese** » Sun Jul 08, 2012 7:53 pm

Guess I had it a little better than the working stiffs when Y2K problems were recognized. I was retired!!!!! Didn't worry about my little lap top at all.

However at that time we were living in South TX - I did get a chance to see twin Brahmas born on New Years day. The first one's name was Y2 & the 2nd one, K. Goodness they were cute!