Ytwok Errors Fixed

CategoryHistorical CategoryYtwok

Here's a good place for "horror stories" of year 2000 bugs that were fixed (crisis averted) before they hit production users.

'If the problem was fixed by the vendor, but happened anyway (because some sites did not upgrade), then describe it in YtwokErrors.

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In 1994, working at a major US railroad, JeffGrigg found and fixed a problem in a shipment tracking system: 6 digit ANSI standard X.12 EDI dates were considered "null" if all zero (6 zeros in a row). But the commonly reused subroutine to convert dates to "YYYYMMDD" format only checked the year for "00" instead of checking the whole field. Thus all dates in the year 2000 (but not the year 2001) would be considered "null", and the tracking system would have no idea when shipments were expected to arrive. (Who's the idiot who decided to check the only field where zero is a valid value??? ;-)

Impact

If not corrected, customer support desk would encounter problems mid to late December, being unable to track delivery dates of shipments. This would not stop the trains, but it would be annoying and embarrassing.

Remediation

Simple fix to a commonly used routine in several programs + production release. (Made annoying by lack of code reuse between COBOL programs.)