Here's a Y2K contribution: Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1998 13:49:00 -0600 From: Jim Burnes <jim.burnes@ssds.com> To: John Young <jya@pipeline.com> Subject: Re: Would you like to archive something for me? References: <199804091755.NAA32193@camel7.mindspring.com> <199804141929.PAA08881@dewdrop2.mindspring.com> Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="------------F5AD0F1DF82F490B65FEDE20" Ok, here it is (the largest attachment I've done so far ;-) [See end] Here is the skinny.... IRS is going to award the contract for its Y2K remediation sometime in October, which is of course a joke. By most estimates they have on the order of 100million lines of code to fix, much of it flakey and undocumented. Any Autocoder programmers left? Anyway, the CIO of the IRS quit recently and this file (prime.pdf) was his plea for help before he left and bought gold or something. If you go to the IRS page that Gary North references this document is just plain gone. Its extremely telling if you look at the data flow diagrams for IRS administrative systems. Its so huge that a I had to zoom in 4 or 5 times before subsystem names started to resolve. I downloaded this when it was posted because after reading it I knew someone would eventually yank it. Jim PS: Some quick math: 100 million lines of code/1 million lines per year = 100 years to fix. 1 million lines per year is how fast the Social (in)Security Administration was able to fix their code and even they won't be compliant. ;-) Feel free to post this message (but not the attachment ;-) to cypherpunks. -- ---------- What Jim sent is the May 1997 IRS RFC which shows the stypefying complexity of the IRS computer octupus and daunting job of fixing Y2K. It is in PDF format, 1,248K in size: http://jya.com/prime.pdf ---------- The cause of bizarro endings is due to writing holding breath to assure short messages to please fast-glance Palm Piloters. Consider the last 2/3s as read to the silly end sigs for Lazy Boy broncos with nothing better to read, like Tim's blinking single liners for presenescent presbyopics.