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IP: A bit more on Y2K and the past
From: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
Date: Sat, 14 Nov 1998 12:25:41 -0500
I cannot agree more with Bobs comment re focusing on the deisgn!!. CFG (Caine, Farber and Gordon)( http://www.cfg.com) for years marketed a product called PDL which focused at improving the design part of programming rather than the coding part on the grounds that that was where the real costs were. It was very successful in very large products where the lack of tools that allowed people to work with people and customers beccame more obvious and critcial. Dave From: "Robert Fabian" <rfabian () rfabian com> Organization: Robert Fabian Associates To: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu> Date: Sat, 14 Nov 1998 11:52:51 -0500 Dave Your personal comments about Y2K prompt a few personal comments from me. I remember back to the thinking machines of the 1950s (Univac I, IBM 650), and was actively involved with several installations in the 1960s. I find most interesting a comparison between the cost of storage back then and today. By my rough calculations, there is a cost difference of (approximately) 1,000,000 between the cost of memory in the 1970s and today. Back then, core memory was priced at something like $1 per byte. Today, semiconductor memory is about $1 per megabyte. The same cost comparison holds between early DASD and current disks. Would it be right to use an extra few megabytes per record, today, to avoid a problem that will occur well into the next millennium? My strong sense is that today's designers would reject this kind of "unnecessary" overhead. The lesson that I extract from our Y2K problems is not that we should consider all future possibilities. Remember, back then, we "knew" that the code was going to be replaced within seven plus or minus two years. It's never possible to take into account all possibilities. What we should do, however, is work toward designs that are robust enough to accommodate change, including change that has not been pre-planned. The important lesson is about design. We're learning, but it's painfully slow. Bob Fabian On 14 Nov 98, at 11:19, Dave Farber wrote: <snip>
I cannot ever remember worrying about the year 2000. It was out of mind as we struggled to get programs running and tried to keep up with the evolution of OS and language changes that flew at us. Sorry people Dave _____________________________________________________________________ David Farber The Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of Telecommunication Systems University of Pennsylvania Home Page: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~farber
--- Robert Fabian Associates 416-769-1885 71 Evelyn Ave Toronto M6P 2Z2 http://www.rfabian.com
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