Learning from the Past; Designing for the Future

摘要

The largest design error in the history of computing provokes little more than a yawn these days. It is over; history. The case of the millennium software bug is closed. Yet, as John W. Garner noted, "History never looks like history when you are living through it." Now that time has blessed us with some perspective, we have a unique opportunity to look back with relatively little bias, revisit the origins of the problem and consider how the bug eluded management controls and what environmental factors facilitated its widespread acceptance in IT departments around the world. In doing so, we can learn something about the present. For example, consider today's analysts who, with minimal knowledge of the law, regularly make data decisions when implementing "Sarbanes-Oxley compliant" ERP systems. A brief step into the past suggests that these analysts may not be particularly different from the analysts of the last century who made decisions about date formats.