The Anonymous Widower

Technology Means It Would Be Easier to Leave the Euro Than It Was To Join

When I wrote the piece about Michael Spencer’s thoughts on the drachma, I didn’t think the whole thing through. I didn’t think about all the new notes that would need to be printed and the conversion of cash machines.

But this article sets it all out. It also contains this interesting paragraph.

“It also rather depends on how individual institutions adapted their systems to the original change-over to the euro,” says Lewis. “My guess is that many organisations in Greece might simply have put a converter around their existing systems, rather as some UK companies did when we went decimal in 1971 – we discovered in the run-up to the year 2000 that at least one major insurance company’s accounts were still running in pounds, shillings and pence!”

So we were still using £sd in 2000. I’ll also admit that in some of the systems I’ve programmed, where we displayed data in Iranian dates or Korean currency, what went on underneath wasn’t pretty.  But it worked!

So how did I find the article.  A friend told me that De La Rue were printing drachma notes.  So I used Google and found that Greece would probably use its own security printer.

Although the De La Rue share price was up by one percent today.

December 5, 2011 - Posted by | Computing, Finance, News |

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