It is January 1, 2006, and sitting watching Television last night – I thought back to 2000 and thought about the fear that we all held watching the ball drop and half-expecting the sewers to back up on Times Square as midnight kicked over.
Also today I am “cleaning out my closet” and pitching some old stuff and came across a Powerpoint Presentation that I made in 1999 about Y2K – at the time, I was the CIO of the College of Engineering at Michigan State University and I got a bit of flak about this talk.
Now six years later I am going to throw away the printout of my slides as I clean my closet so I figure that before I pitch them, I would type them in in case anyone in the future decides to ever look back at this point in time. Kind of a time capsule.
Here are images of this talk

Year 2000 – A view from a college
Charles Severance
Director of Computing Services
College of Engineering
Not too worried about Y2K
We have no core data processing activities
Problems
– getting the right version of Excel and Word
– Operating Systems (NT 4.0 and UNIX)
– Bad BIOS’s – There is no $$ for new computers anyways
What we have done
Talked with AIS
– Helped identify areas we might have missed
– Reassured that AIS services are OK
When we encounter a patch or upgrade that fixes Y2K we apply it
What we will do
Educate our users to perform their own BIOS checks – Before Fiscal year-end
By Summer – All of our server infrastructure and public labs will be Y2K
Fall – Focus on heavy users of data software
– Know the version/pathc for Y2K
– Access, Excel, dBase, FoxPro
Concepts
Be educated about the problem
– AIS and Web Pages
We can lag behind because our problems are the same as millions of other desktops
– If they are not solved by the industry – The College of Engineering can’t help
Assume that my trackball won’t have broken everything in my office Jan 1, 2000
Observations
To the non-aware folks, Y2K is a soap opera
To the technology folks, fixing broken stuff is our daily activity – properly approached, Y2K is just integrated into our regular activity.
Some projects won’t make it on time – what’s new
The Real Disaster
When every person in the USA has $500 extra cash in their pockets and nothing happens Jan 1…
The lines at Mongolian Barbecue will be terrible….
And Best Buy will run out of 10GB disk drives – causing general panic