Word: ibm
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Gates was, in his own field, just as much the boy wonder. He started his first computer company, Traf-O-Data, in high school. After dropping out of Harvard to build Microsoft, he hit the big time at 25 when IBM made an epic blunder in letting him retain the rights to the operating system Microsoft developed for IBM's PCs. Gates, who spent most of his waking hours among computers, turned as inward as the glad-handing Clinton turned outward. New acquaintances traded tales of his bad haircuts, dirty glasses and odd rocking motion. His early reluctance to give...
Wrong. Nothing, especially in the world of computing, is ever that simple. "It was the fault of everybody, just everybody," says Robert Bemer, the onetime IBM whiz kid who wrote much of COBOL. "If Grace Hopper and I were at fault, it was for making the language so easy that anybody could get in on the act." And anybody did, including a group of Mormons in the late '50s who wanted to enlist the newfangled machines in their massive genealogy project--clearly the kind of work that calls for thinking outside the 20th century box. Bemer obliged by inventing...
Programmers ignored Bemer's fix. And so did his bosses at IBM, who unwittingly shipped the Y2K bug in their System/360 computers, an industry standard every bit as powerful in the '60s as Windows is today. By the end of the decade, Big Blue had effectively set the two-digit date in stone. Every machine, every manual, every maintenance guy would tell you the year was 69, not 1969. "The general consensus was that this was the way you programmed," says an IBM spokesman. "We recognize the potential for lawsuits on this issue...
...computer industry wanted to rock the boat. And no one could alter the course IBM had set, not even the International Standards Organization, which adopted the four-digit date standard in the 1970s. The Pentagon promised to adopt century-friendly dates around 1974, then sat on its hands. Bemer himself wrote the earliest published Y2K warnings--first in 1971, then again in 1979. Greeted by nothing but derision, he retired in 1982. "How do you think I feel about this thing?" says Bemer, now an officer at his own Y2K software firm. "I made it possible to do four digits...
Meanwhile, the torch of Y2K awareness passed to a new generation. In the fall of 1977, a young Canadian named Peter de Jager signed on as a computer operator at IBM. His first task was to boot up a nationwide banking system run on an IBM 370. When the machine whirred into life, it asked for the date. As De Jager, a mathematics major straight out of college, entered the number 77, a thought occurred to him. Did this machine care what century it was? With the impetuousness of youth, he marched off to his manager and informed...