[jSully24]

I just shared this story earlier today with my team. This was Cobol insurance claims processing system, shortly before the Y2K issues.

The claims processing system I worked on used a number system that would only go to 4 digits, it would roll over to 0 if we ever processed more than 9999 claims overnight.

Our VP would not listen to us when we said we needed to change that. He said "Claims process fine every night! There is no problem." I had left before they got to that 10,000th claim (thankfully).

That said, anyone need an old COBOL developer?

Edit: now I’m the VP of Engineering. We do work on tech debt regularly.

[julian_t]

Fortran, not COBOL, but I came across a similar thing when helping to update code for Y2K. An insurance company used a 2 digit field for year of birth, assuming that it would always be prefixed with '19'. I sort of forgave them because the code had originally been written in Fortran 2 sometime in the 60s, and who would ever assume that their code might still be in use 40 years later?

[trealira]

In the 1960s, there were still 70 year olds born in the 1890s, and 80 year olds born in the 1880s, so it still doesn't seem like a good decision even for something written back then.

[nikau]

In 1966 a 7.25MB drive cost $25,510.

In todays money that's $246,316.70.

So it would have cost 6 extra cents for every date entry.