Boeing - 7 glitches were reported at rollover

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(Curious to know the details of those seven glitches....)

Business hails smooth Y2K transition

Scarcity of glitches attributed to time and money invested in prevention

01/05/2000

Even the head of Tacoma's Frank Russell Co. was surprised Monday at how smoothly the rollover to the year 2000 went for his company and other businesses around the world. ~snip~ But around the South Sound, as in the rest of the country, businesses such as Russell, Boeing, major financial institutions - and even most small businesses - apparently fared well in their attempt to stop computers from reading the year 2000 as 1900.

"We were expecting more glitches. We were delighted there was virtually nothing," Russell president and chief executive Mike Phillips said Monday. "You always assume something is going to go through the cracks. It was better than we thought."

As the Russell Co. watched the clocks turn in its offices from Auckland, New Zealand, to Tacoma on Dec. 31, problems were few. "We had one or two very small things, but they were probably not connected to Y2K," Phillips said.

He said the glitches were so small that they would have been expected on any normal weekend.

At Boeing on Monday, the mood was jubilant. The company had spent $150 million over more than six years to make sure none of its airplanes would fall from the sky when 1999 turned into 2000.

Boeing reported that Dec. 31 turned out to be a totally routine night in aviation, with no Y2K problems reported by any airline or at any major airport.

Boeing had set up a Y2K command center at the Kent Space Center, and workers there sipped apple cider and ate doughnuts as midnight moved uneventfully from time zone to time zone.

With safety issues settled, Boeing workers spent Saturday, Sunday and Monday testing every conceivable computer application they could think of to make sure those, too, would function properly after the rollover.

"In that time, we've found seven minor glitches," Boeing spokesman Bob Jorgensen said Monday. "One example of the kinds of problems we found had to do with our electronic time-keeping system. A guy who worked New Year's Eve and on into the early morning of Jan. 1 had his hours refused. The computer worked OK on 1999 hours and OK on 2000 hours, but not when you tried to run them together."

Company programmers changed six lines of computer code and the problem was fixed, Jorgensen said.

Of the seven "glitches" discovered through Monday afternoon, six had been resolved and the seventh was expected to be fixed Monday evening, he said.

"That's not bad considering Boeing has 53,000 computer systems running about 300 million lines of code," he said.

A few surprises may yet be in store for Boeing, since about two-thirds of its employees were enjoying holiday breaks that didn't end until this morning.

The other third - primarily workers from the former McDonnell Douglas Corp. in St. Louis and Southern California - went back to work on Monday. Those workers reported no problems, Jorgensen said.

Alaska Airlines had so few passengers over New Year's that it flew six flights with no passengers aboard. The airline had to fly the planes only to position them for their next scheduled flight.

Overall, the airline reported that only 43 percent of the seats had been occupied, compared to a normal average of 70 percent over the New Year's Eve holiday.

~snip~

New Tribune staff writers Mike Maharry mhm@p.tribnet.com, Graham Fysh gnf@p.tribnet.com, Al Gibbs alg@p.tribnet.com and Jim Szymanski jas@p.tribnet.com contributed to this report.

* Staff writer Cynthia Flash cmf@p.tribnet.com covers technology. Reach her at 206-467-9844 or cynthia.flash@mail.tribnet.com.

The News Tribune; Tacoma, Washington http://search.tribnet.com/archive/90days/0104d11.htm

-- Lee Maloney (leemaloney@hotmail.com), February 03, 2000

Answers

Corrected link for article above: http://sea rch.tribnet.com/archive/90days/0104d11.htm

-- Lee Maloney (leemaloney@hotmail.com), February 03, 2000.

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