Programmers flee Y2K problem -- and we're spooked too

[John Young]

Here's a Y2K contribution:

Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1998 13:49:00 -0600
From: Jim Burnes <jim.burnes at ssds.com>
To: John Young <jya at pipeline.com>
Subject: Re: Would you like to archive something for me?
References: <199804091755.NAA32193 at camel7.mindspring.com>
<199804141929.PAA08881 at 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.

-- 

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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

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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.