Quote:And here I always took you for a crotchety old IT guy who wouldn't let his company upgrade from DOS because "this Windows thing is just a fad".

 

This reminded me of my early days at COJ. The IT division charged all city departments for disk space as one way of allocating hardware costs equitably among city agencies. When the payroll system was upgraded to the latest (and probably last) version of COBOL in the mid-80s, the paymaster refused to allow us to expand date fields to accommodate 2 extra digits for the century. It's the taxpayer's money, he said, program around it if it becomes a problem. He wasn't about to waste money on unneeded disk space, and somehow got the department head to not only back him up, but also made it policy for all city financial systems.

 

Then the mid-90s became the late-90s, the paymaster had retired, the department head moved on and we billed all city departments much, much more in analyst and programming hours to convert their systems to Y2K compatibility than was saved storing less data for 10 years.

 

This may have been the most boring IT story ever, but my martini urged me to share.

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