Texaco embedded systems test story

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From Douglass Carmichael: http://tmn.com/shakespeareandtao

The following From Wired Magazine is important. A great piece of reporting, moving from "percent done" to anecdote with understandable detail.

"Abshier is one of the very few corporate Y2K managers who wanted to speak on the record. He had an agenda, of course - "I want to show that Texaco is doing a good job," he said. But his larger goal was to deliver what surely is the most difficult message to convey about Y2K: that Year 2000 problems are real and may indeed be locally severe; and also that hard work, engineering good sense, and intercompany cooperation can minimize the damage.

[snip]

"Cook attached a laptop to the RTU, which gave him a direct interface to the logic in the device. He was, of course, about to do the one thing everyone wanted to do: set the date on the device to December 31, 1999, wait for the year to change, and then see what would happen.

"Using a handheld interface terminal, he entered the date and time: 12/31/99 23:59:45.

"Then we all watched the display on the face of the RTU as the seconds counted up to midnight. 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59 - then the date rolled over."

Click here to read this good little real life story.

Complete story at Wired online: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.04/texaco_pr.html

-- Bill (billdale@lakesnet.net), April 26, 1999


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