I was working for Schering-Plough pharmaceuticals at the time. A lot of the systems were written in the 1980s on IBM mainframe equipment. They didn’t expect them to still be in use 20 years later.
So when Y2K came up – I was there at the time – they had to hire about a dozen COBOL programmers. We had some on hand of course for maintaining the old reports but this required going through very old code with a fine toothed comb.
They’d been trying to retire the old systems and convert to other reporting systems, but some things only sound easy on paper to the higher ups who don’t have to deal with it.
I was only marginally paying attention to it at the time. I wasn’t worried about planes falling or banks failing but I knew in our systems at lot, a lot of really neglected code that should have been upgraded long ago just, kept working and they didn’t want to invest in reinventing the wheel when we’d had a perfectly good one.
After Y2K though, there was a big push to change everything to XML as that was going to be the new thing. And Microstrategy was going to be our datacube or something.