Unlike many Y2K books available, Time Bomb 2000 offers a programmer's point of view on the issue--Edward Yourdon is a software engineer and the author of the well-regarded Yourdon Computing Series for software development. (His coauthor, Jennifer, is his daughter.)
While the Yourdons occasionally use Internet-based Y2K slang, such as TEOTWAWKI (which, for the uninitiated, means "the end of the world as we know it"), it's not likely that they'll be carving out space in a hillside somewhere. They do project a life very different from the one that currently exists, but advocate a commonsense approach to the impending crisis.
To that end, Time Bomb 2000 provides a chapter on each of the areas of infrastructure weakness: public utilities, transportation (automobiles included), banking and finance, news channels, hospitals, telephone and mail services, the U.S. government (social security, food stamps, the IRS, the Defense Department, and a brief overview of state and local agencies). A small portion of the book deals with the question of international economies. Each segment ends with advice on any one of four scenarios: facing a 2-day, 1-month, 1-year, or 10-year failure of each of the given systems. An informative look at what may well be a central issue for us all, Time Bomb 2000 provides important information without trying to answer the unanswerable. --Jennifer Buckendorff
From Library Journal
Optimists may be gleefully eyeing the approaching millennium with great expectations of the innovation that will undoubtedly accompany its dawning, but those with perhaps a more grounded gaze see January 1, 2000, as the day of reckoning for computers and their infinite applications everywhere. The Yourdons (Edward is the author of 25 computer books) offer a doomsday scenario of what life might be like if techno gurus aren't able to correct, on a universal scale, an oversight born when programmers failed to see the significance of the double zeros at the beginning of year 2000. Will ATMs work on January 1 of that year? Will medical devices work? Social Security checks arrive? Will basic services like electricity, water, mail, and food delivery be affected? No one is claiming to know everything for sure, but the Yourdons' harrowing account of what life could be like if computers all shut down at once is both frightening and useful for the solutions it offers. For all computer collections.?Geoff Rotunno, "Tri-Mix" Magazine, Goleta, Cal.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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