The calendar changed to Y2K on the Union campus without
incident following a year of work by staff from the Office of Computer
Services and members of a campus task force.
OCS staffers visited every administrative computer and
most faculty machines over the past year, installing “Y2K
patches” where necessary, said David Cossey, executive director of
OCS. They also checked machines in various labs.
Even as late as December, the College was receiving
patches from software vendors who still were rewriting code, Cossey said.
“We were most concerned about a power outage,”
Cossey said, adding that OCS disabled servers to protect them from hackers
who would use the Y2K as an excuse to do damage. But the power stayed on
and the hackers stayed away.
Rod Bossert, chair of the campus Y2K Task Force, said he
had received no reports of problems this week. Well, only one, he quipped,
referring to a glitch in a Pentagon satellite ground station: “We
lost some of our security surveillance when those spy satellites went
out.”