Happy New Year ... 1980?
Staff -- School Library Journal, 2/1/2000
Y2K, which had threatened technological disaster, proved to be pretty much a yawn, libraries included. Roy Tennant, manager of the University of California at Berkeley's SunSITE and a renowned library tech guru, says he'd heard of "various little glitches, but mostly nothing worth much." Doug Johnson of Mankato (MN) Public Schools says, "We had only one computer not boot and one database that gave us funny numbers, and neither was in a media center."
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The oddest library Y2K story comes from Frederick Muller of the Halsted Middle School Library in Newton, NJ. HMSL has an old 386 PC built as a school project by students and a teacher. "I was running the Winnebago DOS catalog/circulation system on it," says Muller. "I have converted my whole system to their Windows Spectrum system and was just running it as a stand-alone catalog for a few weeks." He planned to toss the machine in January. But before disconnecting it, "I decided to turn it on and see what happened. It reverted back to 1980 on its own and the catalog program is working fine under that date." Muller plans to keep the machine around a while longer.--
Walter Minkel
